


A Hand on Your Knife

by Corpus_Carrion



Series: A Hand on Your Knife [2]
Category: Fallout - Fandom, Fallout 3
Genre: Androids, F/M, Gen, Ghouls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:42:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 70,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/638053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Corpus_Carrion/pseuds/Corpus_Carrion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The recently ghoulified Lone Wanderer fights alongside friends old and new. Contains androids, dank tunnels, and lots of slave collars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to Yellow Rose of the Wastes. If you haven't read that, I recommend doing so before reading this one.
> 
> I should probably note that I'm going to be messing with locations and their sizes, distances between them, etc. I tend to assume places in games would be bigger 'in real life'. E.g. there are probably more than like ten buildings in a town. Also, I don't particularly care about the exact appearance of every metro tunnel in the Wasteland. Thus I've made up a good deal of the scenery here.

The shot hit her like a steel fist punching her in the chest. She stumbled back in the impact. There was an instant when she felt nothing. Then the pain hit her, and it felt as though all the breath had been sucked from her body. She looked down. There was a red spot a few inches below her collarbone. As she watched, the spot rapidly grew, becoming a gushing, deep crimson stream down her shirt.

An extraordinary heaviness filled her. Every movement was excruciating; every breath like a knife in her lungs. Her legs shook and gave out beneath her. Her gun fell from her hand and clattered to the ground next to her. She clasped a hand over the wound, but she knew it would only prolong the inevitable. There were no stimpaks left. She was going to die.

-Two Weeks Earlier-

Lydia was sitting on a worn wooden bench in the shadow of a stone pillar. She slouched back and tried to make herself as unnoticeable as possible. She would probably have been harder to see if she sat on the floor, but that was perhaps just a _bit_ too odd of a thing to do when there was a bench right there. She didn't want to make herself out to be any more suspicious than she already was. The way that Mister Gutsy had yelled at her on the way in made her nervous, and everyone was already giving her weird looks.

A ghoul woman walked by her, and did a double take when she saw her out of the corner of her eye. Lydia smiled politely, not rising from her slouch. The woman raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything as she went on her way. Lydia's smile faded as she returned her attention to the pair across the room from her. It was a man and a woman, both looking quite solemn. She could just hear them over the collective murmur that filled the large, echoey room.

"We're dead, don't you see?" the woman said quietly. Her eyes were downcast and glazed over, focused on something far away and nonexistent. "We're all dead. Rotting from the outside in. My blood is all gone. Soon I'll be nothing but bone, but I'll still be here, walking around. It's all wrong."

"That's not true," the man said. He spoke even quieter than she did, and Lydia followed the movements of his lips to catch what he said. "You got a cut the other day. You bled. The Doc said, remember? He said you're sick. You need to listen to me." He touched her arm, but she snatched it away.

" _You're_ dead, too," she whispered emphatically. The man sighed. He looked up, and suddenly saw Lydia. He gave her a hard look.

She sank even farther back into her shadow and looked away as another conversation drew her attention. A cluster of women stood to her right, speaking in hushed tones at high speed.

"...I mean, it's _Underworld_ , after all. We all know at least a little about the old religions." The others nodded in agreement, and she continued. "But every time I go in there, without fail, she's reading that silly book. She must have it memorized by now. 'A man who goes to hell', indeed. It's very immature, I think, to dwell on things like that. It's very _dark_."

"Of course," another woman said. "You're completely right. It's just odd, is what it is. I mean, she's a perfectly nice girl and all-" (the others nodded and whole-heartedly voiced their agreement again) "-but I think she might be a bit wrong in the head. You know, I hear..." she glanced around conspiratorially and lowered her voice. The others leaned in to hear her. " _I heard she's a satanist."_

The other women gasped and drew back at this divulgence, chattering excitedly among themselves. "Poor Tulip," one said. "We should bring the radio down one day, and cheer her up."

As the others were nodding in unison, there was a disturbance to the left. They all looked over at the commotion. "Patchwork again," one of them said.

Lydia leaned around the pillar to see the small crowd around the crumbling statue in the middle of the room. Some of the people who had been talking or eating or smoking were watching the statue with varying levels of interest. Someone was climbing up the side of it. He wobbled back and forth as he wrapped his fingers around the stone arm of one of the sculpted figures. "Watch this," he said loudly. "Hey. Watch."

There were a few moments when Lydia was sure he was going to fall, but he never did. In a minute he was atop the statue. Standing slowly, arms out to keep his balance, he announced, "Hey. Uh. Look. Watch this." He teetered slightly, and his arms pinwheeled as he tried to regain his balance. After a tense moment, he righted himself. "Wait...wait. That wasn't it. _That wasn't what I was talking about._ I meant this _._ Watch _this_."

Gathering himself up, he bent his knees, then leapt off the statue with a grunt. He flew through the air and landed on his feet. Amazingly, though he collapsed to the ground in exhaustion or simple drunkenness, he seemed unhurt. The spectators went back to their cigarettes and Nuka Colas and conversations. Someone clapped.

Lydia sat back, and jumped when she saw that Harris had appeared next to her. He was wearing that tiny, mocking smile he loved to give her.

"You think you're so clever, don't you?"

"Yes."

"I wish you'd stop sneaking up on me like that."

"I wish I had a million caps." He sat down next to her on the bench. "I wasn't sneaking, anyway. You just weren't paying attention."

Lydia rolled her eyes. She'd missed him when she was back in the vault. After they'd gotten the Enclave off their trail, she'd gone back to 101 to train a replacement doctor. It was unnerving being back there. It had only been a month, but she didn't think she could have stayed there any longer. It wasn't so bad now that Amata was Overseer, there were just too many terrible memories associated with those metal halls. It made her anxious being there again. It felt like a prison.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked.

"What?" She straightened and looked up at him. "We just got here."

"Yeah, and now we can go. I sold everything."

She'd thought they'd at least stay a few days. "But it took so long to get here. Can we just stay the night?"

He rolled one shoulder in a shrug. "I suppose." He looked around the room in a bored manner. "Why? Don't you hate it yet?"

"No. Why would I?"

He grunted noncommittally.

Lydia wasn't sure what she thought of Underworld yet, but it was already apparent how different it was from the rest of the Wasteland. She needed more time here. She'd only been to a city once before. Megaton was so huge and busy and overwhelming that she'd hardly had a chance to take it all in. But Underworld was quiet. The museum was small, and if you sat back in the shadows like this, you could see and hear a lot. It was a little like the vault, actually.

She would have liked to stop observing and talk to someone. But whenever she got up the nerve to speak to one of the ghouls, she'd open her mouth, take a breath, and the person in question would give her an annoyed or confused or even frightened look, and she'd open her mouth wider and turn away and pretend she'd merely been yawning.

"Alright," Harris said. "We can leave in the morning."

"In the morning?"

"Yes. To work. Not all of us are charity cases."

Lydia frowned. "I'm not..." but she cut herself off. She _was_ a charity case, after all. She just hated being reminded of it.

"That was a joke," Harris said quietly when she trailed off. "Don't worry. You don't eat all that much." As he stood up he straightened his jacket and rearranged the strap from which his assault rifle hung. "Go find Carol. Or Tulip." He rolled his eyes slightly. "She'll talk your ear off regardless of how much skin you've got."

He walked off, leaving Lydia sitting there alone on the bench again. She shrugged to herself and pushed off the bench. The circle of women nearby watched as Harris brushed by, and one turned to Lydia as she approached them.

"Hello," the woman said, smiling uncertainly. As she spoke, the others turned to her.

"Hi," Lydia said. "Do you know where...um..." She'd forgotten their names already. "...Tulip. Have you seen Tulip?"

"She's in there," the woman replied. "Underworld Outfitters. She's always in there." The others nodded.

"Right. Thank you." She moved by them, and they began quietly chattering again.

Underworld Outfitters was a small chamber offshooting directly from the main room. Someone had put one of those soft, velvety rope barriers next to the doorway. Lydia petted it as she walked inside.

Against the wall across from the door were rows of shelves piled with an assortment of junk ranging from candlesticks to gun parts. In front of the shelves was a counter, on which the woman behind it leaned. Another woman in a long dress and a wide-brimmed hat was standing in front of the counter.

"...and you shouldn't slouch like that, it's not at all ladylike. Really dear, you need to start taking care of yourself," the woman in the hat was saying.

"Uh-huh..." The woman behind the counter was scraping at a spot on the counter with a fingernail.

"Just a bit of makeup does wonders. I could recommend some brands, if you'd like. You must get the right shade of foundation, though. Try to find something that isn't too yellow. I can help you choose some lipstick that will work nicely. And then if we could just find something for you to wear." She lowered her voice. "Dear, these outfits you wear show _so_ much skin. Do you really think it's appropriate? Especially for..."

"For a ghoul?" the other woman filled in. "You know, I never really saw that as a problem. Seeing as I don't have any skin to show."

The woman in the hat made a small, annoyed sound, but she continued on as if she hadn't been interrupted. "You have lovely dresses in stock sometimes, I don't know why you don't just put on one of those. Something green would be wonderful on you. But make sure it doesn't have any lace, that's so tacky."

"Mm-hmm..." The ghoul behind the counter lifted her fingernail to inspect it, then flicked it to get rid of the counter scum.

The woman in the hat moved away indignantly. "Do you mind? That is disgusting."

The other woman looked up at her from under her eyelashes, and as she did, she suddenly noticed Lydia and straightened. "Oh, hello!" She waved vigorously. "Come in! Looks like I have another customer. Sorry Rochelle, but I think we'll have to cut this short."

"Oh, I wasn't..." Lydia started, but the woman talked over her.

"Yep, I'll see you later, thanks for stopping by, Ms. Rochelle. Have a good day."

Ms. Rochelle turned around then, and Lydia raised her eyebrows involuntarily. In addition to the long dress and hat, the woman wore long gloves and a scarf and, and her face was caked in makeup, if you could call it that. It looked more like paint, so thick that her head was like a white orb with a red mouth and eyes surrounded in brown and black and green. Under the hat, she wore a shoulder-length auburn wig (and there would have been no question that it was a wig even if she wasn't a ghoul), and she carried a battered but carefully cleaned, extra large purse. She looked Lydia up and down, moving only her eyes. "Well. Alright, then. I'll leave you to your work. Goodbye, Katherine." She stepped out of the room, looking like someone had stuck a rod to her spine.

The other woman gestured for her to come closer, and Lydia went the counter. "My name isn't Katherine," she said. "Never was. She likes to call me that because she thinks the name I chose makes me sound like a communist."

"You're Tulip," Lydia guessed.

The woman blinked at her. "Yeah. Oh, you don't have to buy anything," she said, seeing her looking at the shelves behind her. "I won't take it personally. Nobody ever buys anything. I'm just glad you came in when you did. Rochelle was only about halfway through her 'you need to start taking care of yourself' talk. Watch out, she'll be coming for you next. By now she's figured out that most people here couldn't care less what they look like, but you're someone new, and a pretty smoothskin at that. She'll be dressing you up like a doll." She sighed. "What was your name, again?"

"Lydia. I'm not a smoothskin."

"Oh. You just started changing, huh? You didn't have to come here yet, you know. You could still make it out there just fine, looking like that. No one will give you trouble. Well, not for being a ghoul, anyway. I suppose you'd still have the raiders and everything to deal with. But if you just wanted to go to a city you could have picked Megaton or Rivet City or some place like that. Not that I don't want you to be here, I mean. Sorry, that sounded rude."

"Uh...that's okay."

"Anyway, nice to meet you. Did you need something?"

"Ah, no. I don't actually have any money."

Her face lit up. "Really? Would you like to make some?"

"Uh...I don't really-"

"Tell you what. If you do me a favor, I'll give you a few caps. It's just a little thing but it'd be a big help to me. See, this kid Max works for me, doing repairs for customers. Quinn brought his rifle in just now, he can't figure out what's wrong with it, but he needs it fixed real quick, because he's got a schedule to keep and all, delivering things. You know. Max is out in the Lincoln wing, doing who knows what. He wanders a lot. If you could go get him for me, that'd be great. I can't leave the store alone, or I'd do it myself. I swear, all the junkies up at the Ninth Circle have some kind of telepathic ability to tell when I'm not here." She made an exasperated face. "So, will you go get him?"

Well, it wasn't like she had any other pressing matters to attend to. "Uh...okay."

"Great! Here, it's not hard to find, just go out the front doors and take a right, through another set of doors. It says "Lincoln" right above it. He's probably in there somewhere. Don't worry about the ferals, they can tell you're a ghoul even if no one else can."

"Okay." She backed out of the room falteringly. _Max. Okay._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cotard's Syndrome is a real thing, by the way. Pretty neat.

She went back out into the room with the skeletons (which she'd marveled at for a full ten minutes when they came in). The massive door creaked loudly as she heaved it shut. She paused there in the quiet emptiness of the dimly-lit chamber. Fires burning in barrels had contributed a layer of smoke to the atmosphere, and filled sections of the room with a warm, yellowish light. As she walked across the room her footsteps echoed, despite the softness of the soles of her boots. Distantly, she could hear gunfire. Nothing to worry about when it was that far away. Probably some super mutants got too close to the Brotherhood outpost at the Washington Monument.

There were no lights on in the Lincoln exhibit. The Underworld Journey section of the museum could still run off of the backup generators that had been used before the war, but evidently there wasn't enough energy to power the less used areas of the building. In the dark, some shadows moved on the upper floor.

"Hello?"

There was a soft breeze coming from some faraway window, and the air whistled slightly as it wound through the doors and around staircases. Lydia heard a small scraping noise. She edged forward, and her movement was met with a hiss. An emaciated silhouette, vaguely reminiscent of a human, appeared at the top of the stairs. A cold feeling came over her.

The figure swayed in place for a moment as it looked at her, then turned and shuffled back out of sight. Lydia exhaled. She'd seen feral ghouls a few times before, in the metro tunnels, but they hadn't attacked her. They seemed to mostly mind their own business as long as you didn't look too much like food.

_This is stupid. They're not going to hurt me._ She walked up the staircase. Two people were on the landing. _I guess they're not really_ people _anymore._ One squatted in a corner, tearing a piece of paper into small shreds, then letting them drift to the floor. The other simply stared at the wall, seeming mesmerized. It wheezed steadily with each intake of breath. Lydia tried to see what it was looking at, but the wall was devoid of anything worth noting. She leaned around and looked at the ghoul's face. Its eyes were wide and glazed, and so clouded that she wondered whether it could see at all.

It suddenly cocked its head to look at her, and she put her hand to her gun. It gave her the same blank stare it had given the wall. Its eyes followed the length of her body down to the floor, then stopped there, as though it had forgotten about her.

She wasn't scared of them. Not really. Ferals didn't attack other ghouls. What really frightened her was the thought that she could someday be the one looking out of those glazed eyes.

"Just keep out of the radiation unless you're really hurt," Harris had told her. "If you start glowing, I'm putting you down."

She was sure he was joking about the last part. Pretty sure.

"Max?" she called. She left the ferals to continue her search. The hallway off the stairs was half filled with debris and lined with doorways. She picked her way down it, looking carefully through each dark door, and called out again. She waited, but it was quiet.

She wound her way around the rooms for quite some time before she heard a noise. It came from another hallway she was passing by. She stopped in the intersection. "Hello?"

There was the sound of someone walking on loose concrete, then a tall figure stepped out of a doorway and into the hall about 20 yards out. It stood too still to be feral.

"Are you talking to me?" he asked. His soft voice was surprisingly clear.

"Max?"

"That's me."

"Tulip asked me to get you."

He came forward, and as he neared, Lydia could see a shock of blonde hair and smooth, even, light skin. "She needs me?"

"Yeah. She said something about fixing this guy's gun."

He nodded. In an oddly monotone voice, he said, "I'll go back, then. Thanks." He moved to go around her.

"Hey."

He turned back to look down at her, and smiled faintly. "Yes?"

"You can't go out there."

"Why not?"

_Come on, even_ I _know this._ "The ferals will attack you. You're a smoothskin, right?"

"I'm not a ghoul."

"Right...well, then they'll attack you if you go out there."

"You're a smoothskin, also," he observed.

"No, I'm not, I just look like one. How did you get past them when you came in here, anyway?"

"I...uh..." He suddenly looked very uncomfortable.

"They weren't here earlier?" she suggested. He inclined his head in something that might have been a nod. _Weirdo._ "Okay, well, how about you wait here while I clear them out?"

"Alright."

Lydia returned to the main room, where the necrotic creatures still stood. A few more had gathered now, in fact. When she entered, a few of them looked up at her curiously. She stepped closer to them, but they didn't move. She waved her hands toward them in a 'go away' gesture. They were mostly ignoring her now.

"Hey." The closest one turned to her. Lydia pointed toward the door at the far end of the room. "Go over there." She emphasized with more pointing motions. The ghoul stared at her.

By this point, if she were a smoothskin, the ghoul would have charged her. No one seemed to know why they left non-ferals alone. It was the smell, she thought. They were always sniffing everything. The first time she'd seen a feral, it had come up close and smelled her. It acted very curious, like it couldn't figure her out, but in the end it left her alone. They could smell the difference between a ghoul and a smoothskin. They must have felt some kind of kinship with them, because they attacked just about everything else. Still, she didn't like testing them like this. Just because they didn't kill her on sight didn't mean they wouldn't if she provoked them.

She tentatively edged yet closer to the ghoul. Finally, it hissed and shuffled away. It wandered toward the stairs, and she moved around to herd it the other way.

At long last, she'd moved them all into the other room. She closed the door behind them, and hoped they wouldn't come back before she and Max left.

She backtracked to where she'd left him. He hadn't moved an inch.

"They're gone," she said.

"Thank you."

"Sure."

They walked down the hallway together, not necessarily because they needed to be together, but because they were both heading back to the same place. Max was quiet. Once or twice he stumbled over the rubble.

"So...what are you doing in Underworld?" Lydia asked.

"I've been staying with Tulip for the past couple months. I help her with repairs in exchange for room and board."

"Are you relatives?"

"No. She was a friend of a friend. I didn't meet her until just recently."

Lydia nodded. "Where are you from, then?"

"North."

They were coming up on the room with the stairways. The ferals were still in the other room, so they hurried past.

When they got to the giant skull, Max easily pulled open the doors that she'd had so much trouble with. _Showoff._ She followed him back into Underworld Outfitters. Tulip was leaning her elbows on the counter again, but she perked up when they came in. "Hey, you're back!" She reached behind the counter and retrieved a hunting rifle. She handed it to Max. He immediately began examining it.

"What's the problem?" he asked.

"Oh yeah," Tulip said. "He started telling me, but you know how I am with that stuff. I told him to just write it down for you." She gave him a note scrawled on a scrap of paper, which he scanned it quickly. He set the gun down on the counter and went to the corner of the room, where a mattress lay on the ground. He picked up a small metal toolbox that sat at the foot of the bed and brought it back over. The implements inside clanked as he deposited the box on the countertop.

Tulip turned to Lydia. "Oh! Here." She reached behind the counter again and pulled out a handful of caps, holding them out to her.

Lydia considered declining them, but the idea of having her very own money was too exciting to pass up. She took them from her and dropped them into her pocket. "Thank you."

"Thank _you._ You know, I think I like you. You should stick around. If you want. It's so boring down here..."

Max gave her a hurt glance.

"Not when _you're_ here,," she said with a reassuring smile. "But you go off by yourself so often. What have you been up to, anyway?" she asked him.

He shrugged without looking up. "You know. Exploring." He gave her a quick smile, but then he looked disappointed. "I didn't find any books for you. I've been looking. There just aren't any that are still readable."

"Ah, well. I've still got _Paradise Lost_."

"You've read _Paradise Lost_?" Lydia asked her.

The woman's eyes widened in surprise. " _You've_ read it?"

"I was really into mythology in eighth grade," Lydia explained. "I've read everything."

Tulip's brow furrowed. " 'Everything'?" She paused. " 'Eighth grade'?"

"Ah..." Lydia wavered. She hadn't thought about whether she wanted to tell anyone else about the vault. That small bit of information had caused her plenty of trouble in the past few months. Well, it was a little late to back out now. Besides, she doubted there were any Enclave spies lurking in Underworld. They'd have a bit of a difficult time blending in, unless Max was one. _I don't think so._

So she took a breath and explained that she grew up in Vault 101, and that she'd gone to school for twelve years, and that she'd uploaded hundreds of digital books onto her Pip-Boy and spent hours upon hours reading them all.

"You'd probably like _The Iliad_ ," Lydia told her.

"I read that one, too!" Tulip said, slapping the counter in excitement. "Quinn brought a copy back for me. There were a few parts missing, but I could still read most of it."

"How about _The Odyssey_? It's the sequel."

"There's a _sequel_? Do you have it?"

"Well, no." She held out her left arm demonstratively. "I don't have my Pip-Boy anymore."

Tulip looked so dejected that Lydia felt guilty for leaving her Pip-Boy behind. She should have tried to save some of the information on the computer before she destroyed it. "I could tell you the story, if you'd like," she offered.

Her face lit up. "Really?" But then she looked behind Lydia. "Hello," she said. "Come in!"

Lydia looked to the door. A familiar-looking man walked in. She couldn't quite place him. It was hard to tell ghouls apart, sometimes. He might have been the one she'd seen talking to that sick woman, she thought. Then he saw her, and gave her a disparaging look. _Yeah. Definitely him._

"Don't you go away," Tulip said to Lydia. She turned her attention to the customer. "Can I help you, Joseph?"

He gazed at Lydia for a moment longer before he said anything. "One human wasn't enough, huh?" he said quietly. "Are you starting a collection?"

Max's busy hands stuttered and stopped, but he didn't look up from the carefully arranged rifle parts.

"Don't be like that," Tulip said. "Come on. Do you want to buy something or what?"

"I need Quinn or Harris to find a medication for me next time one of them goes out."

Tulip nodded. She took out a clipboard. "They're both here now. Quinn's leaving today, so I can give it to him before he leaves if you want. That should be fastest. I don't know when Harris is leaving or when he'll be back."

"Fine," the man said. He took the pencil that Tulip offered him and wrote something down on the legal pad. Lydia peeked at it. He'd written down the name of a drug that treated schizophrenia.

"She has Cotard's Syndrome," Lydia said.

They all looked at her. "What?" Joseph said sternly.

"That woman you were talking to...That's Cotard's Syndrome. You should try anti-depressants."

He set down the clipboard and pencil, a little too hard. "I'm sorry, who _are_ you? What are you doing here? I don't understand why you people force us down here, then want to follow us in. First that Reilly woman, then him, and now you."

Tulip and Max watched the exchange cautiously. "Don't talk like that," Tulip said. Her friendly demeanor had disappeared. "If you're going to be rude, just leave."

"I'm not a human," Lydia said, then sighed. "I mean, I'm _human_ , but I'm not-"

"Just go back outside where you belong," the man said. _If only he could see the irony of that comment._ "Leave us alone."

"I was trying to help," Lydia muttered.

"I didn't ask for your help. You've got quite a bloated ego if you think you know more than our doctor."

"I _am_ a doctor. Maybe if I could just talk to her, I could-"

That seemed to be exactly the wrong thing to say. He enunciated, "If any of you go anywhere near her-"

"What's going on here?" A woman with a laser rifle on her back had appeared in the doorway. Lydia recognized her as the one they'd seen on their way out of the metro tunnels.

Joseph leaned away from Lydia. "You let in anyone these days, Willow?" he said. "Next you'll be inviting in the Brotherhood of Steel."

Willow crossed her arms. "She came in with Harris. I don't think she's gonna be a problem."

The man looked mildly surprised, but his attitude didn't change. He gave Lydia and Max a final glare. "Just leave us alone." He stalked out of the store.

Willow moved to the side to let him pass. She looked back at Tulip and shrugged with a small smile.

"Thanks," Tulip said.

"No problem." She turned to Lydia. "I told you to stay out of trouble, kid. You should lie a little lower."

Lydia blushed.

"Don't worry about it too much. Everyone will know who you are soon enough. Word travels pretty fast down here. Anyway, speaking of which, where's Harris? I need him and Quinn."

"I don't know, he was going upstairs last I saw," Lydia told her. The woman nodded and left before Lydia could ask what she needed them for.

"Sorry about that. We aren't all like that, honest." Tulip said, sounding genuinely embarrassed. She rested her hands on the counter and tapped her fingers anxiously. Max had gone back to work on the rifle.

Then Tulip looked up at her with a quizzical expression. "Are you really with Harris?"

"Yeah."

She raised her eyebrows, but shrugged dismissively.

"What? Why do you ask?"

"Nothing. It's just...I figured you probably knew somebody, but I wouldn't have guessed him. He's a little..."

"Aloof?"

"Grumpy."

Lydia laughed. "He's not _grumpy_."

"Whatever you want to call it. He never talks to me. He told me to _be quiet_ last time he came in. He really said that. He didn't even ask and say 'please' or anything."

"Well...he's an introvert," Lydia defended lamely.

"Quinn always talks to me, you know. About the outside and everything. He's nice. He says Harris paints himself into corners in fights. Did you know they used to go out together sometimes?"

Lydia shook her head.

"That was before I got here," she said, leaning back on her heels and folding her arms. "Underworld has always been pretty secluded, cut off from the rest of the Wasteland. That's the whole point, really. So we've always had people like them who help out with getting food and things like that. We don't have an unlimited supply down here, you know.

"I only got here about five years ago, but from what I understand, Willow did that a long time ago. It must have been..." She cast her eyes upward as she counted mentally. "It must have been around 60 years ago when she started. And then Quinn came, about 20 years after that. It's not often that we get someone who can actually handle themselves out there _and_ is willing to trade and scavenge for us. You don't see anyone else risking their necks for the rest of us like that. So then when Harris first got here, another 20 or so years after that, I guess he helped Quinn with his route, but it didn't last long."

"Why not?"

"Because Harris is too _aloof_." She smiled. "I don't know. Like I said, I wasn't there. Anyway, what was that story you were going to tell us, again?"

Lydia spent the next hour retelling _The Odyssey._ It was a story she hadn't read for years, but she found that the more she told, the more details she remembered. Several times she went back to add something she'd forgotten to mention about a previous scene. She wasn't sure she did it justice, but Tulip seemed happy with her rendition. It was nice to have someone so eager to listen to her talk about things she'd read. If she'd started telling this story to Amata, she would have gained only a withering look and a yawn for her efforts. The only downside was that, honestly, it was a little exhausting talking to Tulip. She never seemed to want the conversation to end. But at long last, she'd decided that it was time to close the shop and had told Lydia good-bye.

She went back out to the main room. It must have been late, because most of the people loitering there had disappeared into the surrounding rooms where they slept. She wondered how they kept track of time. Someone must have had an accurate clock somewhere, because there was no natural light to be found in the museum. What windows there were had long since been tightly boarded up.

She wandered through Underworld for a while, unsure of where to go. Harris had gone off with Willow more than an hour ago and hadn't yet returned. The only place still open was the Ninth Circle, and Tulip had advised against going there. She instead returned to her bench. The room was empty now but for one or two other pairs, all quiet and huddled in corners by themselves. Lydia pulled her knees up and put her feet on the bench, leaned back against the pillar, and shut her eyes. It was only a short while before she was drifting off.

She awoke suddenly to the sound of the front doors creaking open. She shivered at the cold that had settled into her limbs while she slept.

Someone came inside into the dim of the Underworld exhibit. She could tell it was Harris, though it was too dark to see his face very well. She realized, suddenly, that they'd been around each other long enough now that she could recognize him by the way he moved-slow, cautious, and economical. She wondered what she looked like when she moved. _Sickly cat?_ she guessed. _Probably._

She got up to meet him. "Where are we going to sleep?" she said, yawning.

"Do you have a preference?" he asked.

"Not really."

He tipped his head toward the stairs and started down them. Lydia followed.

"Where were you guys?"

He shook his head slightly and gestured for her to keep following.

"Tell me," she pushed.

"I'll tell you, alright? Wait."

They left the Underworld exhibit. From the room with the dinosaur skeleton, they went through an archway with 'Resource Wars' written above it, half blocked by debris. They climbed over it and went down the hallway beyond until it curved into a dead end. The entire hall was cut off by a section of the building that had caved-in. Harris's pack was already lying there, and he sat down next to it.

"Here?" Lydia asked. "Why?"

"Too many people in there," he said. "And Carol's is full."

"Alright, then." A bed would be nice, but she was used to sleeping on the ground by now. This was as good a place as any. She squatted next to him, crossing her arms over her knees. "So what happened?"

He lifted the rifle from his back and laid it down beside him. "Somebody's here who shouldn't be. A group of armed humans in uniforms."

Lydia's stomach dropped. "Enclave?"

"No. I've never seen these people before."

She frowned. "Do you think they're mercenaries? What were they doing?"

"I don't know," he said. "That's what we were trying to find out. Willow saw them sneaking around on the other side of the museum, so she got Quinn and I and we watched them for a while. We followed them into one of the metro tunnels, but we lost them there."

"Hm." She could see why he'd waited to tell her. "You don't want anyone else to know this is going on?"

"No. Willow didn't want to tell everyone yet. If they become a problem, we'll have to make it public. But for now, keep it to yourself."

"Don't you think everyone has a right to know if there's a possibility that they're in danger?"

"They're not in danger. I doubt they'll bother us unless we get in their way, and we have Charon and Cerberus here if they do."

"They'll bother us if they're mercenaries and someone hired them to kill one of us."

He took out a cigarette and flicked a lighter next to it several times. It seemed to be almost out of fluid. Lydia watched it spark, and spark, and finally there was a tiny flame that lit up the dark room. "I don't think anyone here is worth paying somebody to kill."

"What about you?"

"Me? Why would someone want to kill me?"

"It just seems like, wandering the Wastes for 40 years, at some point you would've stepped on somebody's toes." She shrugged. "I bet that could be the case with a lot of people here."

"Could be." He took a drag and breathed out a stream of smoke into the air above them.

She buried her nose in her forearm. "That smells gross," she said in a muffled voice. "It doesn't usually smell like that."

He shrugged in a vaguely apologetic way. "It's not my usual brand. I don't like it either, but it's all I have left." He took another few breaths through the cigarette, looked at it in distaste, and put it out on the floor, even though it was only half gone. He looked over at her. "What would you think about staying here a little longer than we planned?"

"Okay," she said quickly.

He looked mildly amused. "That's what I thought."

"Why did you change your mind?"

"Quinn is leaving tomorrow, and I don't want to leave Willow here alone, in case those humans make a nuisance of themselves."

"Those smoothskins, you mean?"

Harris rolled his eyes. "Yes, Lydia, the smoothskins."

"Aren't there others who can help? You can't be the only one here who knows how to use a gun."

"Being able to use a gun and being able to use a gun _well_ are two different things."

"I see." She settled back against the wall. As she stretched, turning her head side to side, she saw Harris looking at her neck. She reached up and touched it. It was cracked and raw. Ever since she'd gotten the slave collar off, there had been a patch of dry skin there. There were also patches on her ankles and heels, where her boots were rubbing. Harris had suggested tying them tighter, which had helped some.

"It's stopped itching," Lydia said. "My feet still hurt, though."

He nodded, looking away. "Your feet will lose a lot of skin. It won't hurt for long."

"Just until the nerves die?"

"I don't know. Something like that."

From what she understood so far, it sounded like ghouls lost a lot of skin during the first stretch of their degeneration, the duration of which varied from weeks to months. After that time, the process slowed down enough to allow tissue to regrow at a rate that was about equal to the speed of decomposition. Nerve endings on the surface of exposed skin and muscle would gradually die off. After that, there was little pain. But up until then...

She looked at her shoes, considering whether or not she should remove them. In the end, she decided to leave them on. It really wasn't genuinely painful so much as very uncomfortable, but the process of getting them off would be more of an annoyance than it was worth.

"I was talking to Tulip," Lydia said. "She said you used to go out with Quinn, before you started going by yourself."

"Yeah."

She waited for him to continue. He kept silent.

"So, what, did you break up?"

He rolled his eyes. "I'm not talking about this."

Now she was _really_ interested. She leaned forward and propped her head on her hands again. "Why not?"

"Because. Go to sleep."

"No."

He gave her a dark look, and she smiled back. They stared each other down. If she hadn't known him, she might have been afraid he was going to hit her.

Finally he sighed and looked away. "You can't tell anyone about this."

"Okay."

He cleared his throat. "I...Quinn...developed...feelings for me."

" 'He developed...' " Lydia stared at him. Then her smile grew, and she threw up her hands to cover her mouth.

"It was not funny."

Lydia snorted. She covered her face and was quiet until she managed to quell the urge to laugh. "So...so, you didbreak up."

"No," Harris said, straight faced.

Her mouth twitched. "Okay."

They looked at each other for another moment, then Harris turned away to fiddle with his gun. She couldn't tell what he was doing, but she could see the corner of his mouth turning down the way it would when you're trying to force a smile away.

When he turned back to her, he looked as serious as before. "Lydia, Willow is the only other person who knows. We'd like to keep it that way. Quinn spends a lot more time here than I do, and if this got out it would be embarrassing for him."

"I won't say anything," she assured him. "So, he's not, uh...out of the closet?"

"That's not the problem. People here don't really have an issue with that."

Lydia frowned. "Then what _is_ the problem?"

"I'm 41. Quinn is 63. This happened a little over 20 years ago."

She counted back the years in her head. "Oh. People do have an issue with that?"

He shrugged. "I don't think age difference is much of problem, usually, since we live as long as we do. There was more to it than that. I was a kid, and I had just gotten here. He was supposed to be...I don't know, 'showing me the ropes', I guess. He held a sort of parental responsibility over me. It would reflect badly on him if people found out he was interested in me. It would seem like he was taking advantage of the situation."

"Was he taking advantage of the situation?"

"I don't think so, but that's what it would seem like to anyone else."

"Is this why you don't come here very often?"

"Of course not. It was a long time ago." He laid back and closed his eyes.

"Then why?"

He shrugged. "I just don't like it. Don't you think we've talked enough for today? You're going to make me strain my voice," he said sarcastically.

Lydia snorted. "Well, we wouldn't want that." She pulled a blanket from his pack and wrapped it around herself. "Especially since I was hoping you'd sing me 'Let's Go Sunning' to wake me up tomorrow."

"Yeah, I'll be sure to do that."


	3. Chapter 3

Lydia pulled at a chunk of cement until it rolled away from the rest of the pile. A piece that had been wedged on top of it lost its balance and fell with it. She leapt out of the way to keep it from hitting her feet.

They'd already taken apart a good deal of the pile, and the area under the archway was covered in bits of rubble in various sizes. Most of it was just pieces of marble and cement and, occasionally, wood. They found a little metal, and some small things like screws and washers. According to Max, really big pieces of metal and really small pieces, like the screws, were the most valuable because they were harder to find. Medium-sized scraps were relatively easy to come by, and were fairly useless.

Part of the wall had been torn apart. Now that the pile of debris in front of it had diminished, Lydia could see inside the wall. The light from the flaming barrels in the mammoth room illuminated it just enough that she could see it reflecting off of something shiny.

"I think there are pipes in there," she said, pointing to them. "Can you see?"

Max rose and went to look. He had a hard time picking his way over the minefield of marble. Lydia moved over to let him see. He squinted at the pipes.

"Do you think we should try to get them out?" she asked. "Or maybe they'd be more useful intact, if they haven't been bent."

He looked confused. "Why?"

"If they ever expanded Underworld into the rest of the museum, if they ever wanted to get the rest of the building running, it would be better if the plumbing was still there. It's easier to leave it there than to take it out and try to put it back in later."

"I never thought of that."

"We can ask Winthrop later. Let's just leave it for now."

"Okay," Max agreed.

Lydia looked down at the mess they'd created. She decided it was time for a break, and she stepped over it into the main room. "How come this is still here, anyway? You'd think all this stuff would have been picked clean by now."

"A lot of it is. It's only the stuff underneath the rubble that's been left alone. No one wants to go to the trouble of digging through all of it."

"Isn't there anywhere else that hasn't been looked through yet? I'm tired of digging."

"I'm not."

"No kidding." He was hardly breaking a sweat, and he was getting through about twice as much as she was. It was beginning to annoy her. "We can't go in the Lincoln section; the ferals are still in there." Well, they _could_ go there, really. But Lydia didn't want to have to see them again. "What about the metro station outside?" she asked. "I bet people don't go out there very often, do they?"

Max thought. "No, not very often," he said carefully.

Lydia started toward the main entrance and gestured for him to follow. "Come on, then, I bet there's a lot more stuff down there than up here."

"I don't know if that's a good idea," Max said, but he followed her nonetheless. "There could be ghouls down there, too. Or other things."

Lydia shrugged. "Just mole rats and things, probably. I came in that way the other day and there were only a few raiders."

He stopped. "Raiders?"

"They're gone now, Max. We cleared them all out. But they were pretty deep down there, we don't even need to go that far in." She turned back to him. He was shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot. "Okay?"

He nodded.

"Do you have a gun?"

He shook his head.

"Maybe Tulip has one you can borrow."

He shook his head again. "I'm no good with guns."

"You can sure fix them well enough."

He shrugged and gave her a sheepish smile. "I can't shoot, I should say. I haven't got the hand-eye coordination."

"You just need to practice more, I bet. I've gotten a lot better, just in the past couple months."

"No. It wouldn't help."

Lydia wondered how someone survived in the Wasteland without being able to shoot. Why would you not even bother to try? She just shrugged. "If you say so."

When they opened the museum doors, a blinding stream of sunlight greeted them, and Lydia held an arm over her face. It was overcast today, but the light was still in stark contrast to the museum's lighting. Max didn't seem bothered. It seemed that her eyes were still more sensitive to the sun than others'.

Willow was leaning against the short wall that surrounded the entrance to the subway station. She turned when she heard the door open, and waved to them. "Taking a walk?"

"Scavenging," Lydia replied.

She nodded. "Be careful down there. Tell me if you see anything suspicious, will you?"

"Okay."

"Have fun."

As they descended the stairs, Max said quietly, "I like Willow."

"Yeah?" Lydia said. "I think I do too." She dragged open the chain-link gate, and they slid through the opening. She didn't close it behind her. Just as soon as her eyes had adjusted to the sunlight, it was dark again, and she waited for them to readjust. "Is it hard being the only smoothskin here?" she wondered. How many times had she interrupted a confrontation like that one the other day?

He smiled. "I don't mind it. Most people like me. I don't start fights. I try to get along with everyone."

"Seems like some people don't want to get along."

"You're thinking of that man in the shop the other day." He lowered his voice, as though that would make his words less likely to offend. "Perhaps you should have left him alone. When things like that happen to me, I just stay quiet and they usually calm down."

She looked up at him. He smiled back. _He actually thinks this is good advice._ "Well, I don't," she said. "That guy was being a jerk."

"He was worried for his friend."

Lydia shrugged. She looked around the mouth of the metro tunnel. It was dark. She wished she had her Pip-Boy to light the room. _I need to get a flashlight._ "Can you see anything?"

"Yes," he said as he scanned the room. He edged farther in. His head swept slowly side to side. "There's a lot of concrete. I don't see anything useful."

"Let's keep going." Lydia picked her way carefully across the floor, navigating largely by touch. Max followed. They went around a corner, and it got brighter. There was some kind of emergency backup light that, by chance, was still getting electricity. It bathed the room in dim blue light. Beyond the light, the hall descended into the main metro terminal. After Lydia had checked for feral ghouls, they ventured into the cavernous structure. They walked out onto the raised platform above the subway tracks. Several sets of defunct escalators led to the lower level.

"I haven't been down here before," Max said as he stared around. His voice echoed, and the sound of his words returned to him several times over.

"It's kinda cool, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Hello!" Lydia called, listening to the echoes.

" _Shh_ ," Max said hurriedly. He whispered, "Everyone will know we're here. What if there _are_ raiders?"

Lydia waved a hand dismissively. "There's nobody here." He was probably right, though. They should keep it quiet.

Lydia found a few paper dollars in the ticket booth under the counter, but there was little else of value on the upper level. She went down one of the escalators, Max following close behind. Each step let up a puff of dust. Lydia looked at their footprints. She and Harris had come up this escalator when they came in, and she could see the prints clearly. As she looked at them, she realized there were far too many footprints to have been left by just the two of them. She stopped on the steps.

"What?" Max said from behind her.

The smallest prints were obviously hers. But Harris's blended in with several more sets that went up and down the stairs. "Look at all the footprints."

Max looked around in front of them and behind them, studying the trails. "Were they there when you came through before?"

"I don't know. I don't think so." She turned to look up at Max, and he looked back nervously.

"It's probably nothing," Lydia said. "Someone else from Underworld was down here before us, I bet."

"Quinn did say he always travels by the tunnels..." Max admitted hesitantly.

"See? He left just yesterday."

"But that's only one person."

Lydia ignored him as she continued down the escalator, but she walked slower than before. As she reached the bottom, she took out her laser pistol. She followed the footprints a short way, but they soon disappeared into the shadows.

"You can see in the dark better than I can," she noted. "Will you help me follow the them?"

He went in front of her and looked at the prints in the dirt and dust. He went forward, pausing once in a while when he lost the trail. They followed it down the side of the tracks and into the tunnel. A few times they heard a sound and jumped. It always turned out to be nothing. Or, at least, nothing that tried to kill them immediately after the sound. The third or fourth time, Max stopped with a small sigh and turned to Lydia.

"I don't think this is a good idea. Maybe we should get Willow," he said in a hushed voice.

They had been walking for about five minutes now, and they were pretty far into the tunnel. The footprints faded in and out, but the ones they could see were still going in a straight line down the tracks, direct and purposeful. It wasn't the path of someone who was exploring or scavenging. Could have been Quinn, but he traveled alone. Maybe Max was right.

"But...don't you want to know where they go?" Lydia protested.

"Not really."

"Just a little bit farther, then we'll go back. Okay? We already came all this way."

Max nodded solemnly and continued forward.

It was a few minutes later when Lydia stepped in something that made a gooey sound when her foot hit it. _Please don't be blood_. She lifted her foot and look down at the puddle. In fact, it was not blood, but a greenish grey substance that glowed very slightly. Plasma. Which obviously hadn't come from her or Harris.

"Does Quinn have a plasma weapon?" she asked quietly.

"I don't think so," he whispered. He looked at Lydia hopefully. "Let's go back now."

"But don't you want to know where this came from?"

"No!"

Lydia sagged. "Well...maybe we _should_ get Willow," she conceded. "Let's-"

But then, as her eyes followed the path a little farther on, she saw that they finally turned off of the tunnel path. She pushed past Max to go up to them. They disappeared inside a doorway with a light next to it. The dust on the steps to the doorway, which presumably led to some kind of maintenance room (Employees Only, the sign next to the door read), had been scuffed away. She climbed the few steps to the alcove the doorway sat inside of and pressed her ear to the door. She closed her eyes and listened. She could hear nothing.

Very slowly, Lydia moved her hand to the door handle and pushed down on it. The door slid open with a small creak. She could see no movement beyond it. She pushed it open the rest of the way, and was about to enter the corridor beyond when Max stopped her.

"Don't go in there."

She paused, looking between him and the hall. _This is another one of those things. This is me being stupid again. This is sleeping next to toxic waste all over again._ But there was something here-something worth seeing. She could feel it, and she was so close...

An odd sound suddenly came to her attention. Among the echoes of machinery and buzzing lights and the breeze, there was something else that sounded suspiciously like the rhythmic tapping of footsteps. She pushed Max back onto the stairs and closed the door behind them.

"What's wrong?" Max whispered urgently.

"There are people over there." Lydia closed the door all the way, lest they notice it was open and come to investigate, but she put her ear to the metal again. Max stood behind her, anxiously running his hand through his hair.

Lydia didn't hear anything for a while, then there were more footsteps. Someone was moving inside. They paced a few steps, then stopped, then started again. She looked back at Max and shrugged. He shook his head back. Neither of them dared to speak.

The footsteps started again. They were coming closer. Lydia saw a shadow on the crack at the bottom of the door. She stumbled down the steps and quickly shooed Max down the tunnel, back the way they'd come. The door opened behind them, and Lydia stopped. If they kept running, he'd hear them. If they stopped, he'd see them. She held her gun at the ready and pushed herself against the wall in the shadows, for lack of a better hiding spot. Max crouched behind her.

The person in the room came down the steps and stood in the light. It was a smoothskin wearing a dark blue uniform. On his left shoulder was a patch with "SRB" embroidered on it. She felt more than heard the sharp breath Max took.

The man slowly scanned the tunnel. He turned to the left, and when his eyes fell on the shadow Lydia hid in, his posture changed subtly. He squinted into the dark and reached for his gun.

"Hey-" Lydia started. She held up her hands in an attempt to show him that they didn't want a fight, but he was already shooting. She dodged out of the way and fired back. The laser went over the man's head, and he ducked back into the doorway. Lydia turned on her heel and sprinted down the tunnel. She only had a few seconds' head start before she heard the man shoot back at her. Green light streaked past her. She swerved in the tunnel slightly to stay in the shadows. Max's feet pounded against the concrete and gravel behind her. The man kept shooting, and the shots sounded off in a familiar tinny rattle. He didn't try to speak to them. He just shot.

"Hey," Lydia shouted again. "We're not raiders. We-" Plasma streaked past her head in reply.

They hadn't been running for long when Lydia's side started to ache. She couldn't keep this up forever. She ran around a corner, and up ahead was a stack of cinderblocks built into a short wall. She dove behind it.

Max ran a little slower than Lydia, but unlike her, he showed no signs of fatigue. As he rounded the corner, she waved him onward. "Keep going," she whispered harshly, breathing hard. For a moment she thought he was going to protest, but then he nodded and kept running. He understood. He was the bait.

The uniformed smoothskin came around the corner at full speed. Lydia heard his feet hit the ground down the way, rapidly getting closer and closer. He fired again, and the blinding green light that shot past made her see spots.

"Ah!"

The pat-patting of Max's footsteps halted. The man ran past Lydia, and as he came into view behind the cinderblocks, she fired. He went down instantly. It was a direct hit through the center of his back. He didn't so much as twitch once he fell to the ground.

Lydia ran past him, into the darkness of the tunnel. "Max?"

"I'm here," he said.

Now she saw him, kneeling a few yards away. She rushed over and leaned down next to him. "Are you alright? Where did he hit you?"

"My leg." He stood up unsteadily. "It's okay, it's not bad. it only grazed me."

There was a scorched hole in his pants just below his knee. "Maybe I should look at it," Lydia said.

"No, it's okay. It doesn't even hurt. Look." He bent his knee several times.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, it's fine." He looked back at the body behind them. The man was sprawled face down on the ground. There was a neat burn hole in the back of his jacket. "We should go," he said in a lowered voice. "There might be more of them." Lydia nodded, and they hurried down the tunnel. Max limped slightly, occasionally staggering over debris. Lydia walked near him and kept one eye behind them.

Willow was there to meet them when they came out of the station. She looked over her shoulder at them when they opened the gate. "Find anything?" she asked, looking bored. Then she saw Lydia helping Max up the stairs. "Hey, what happened?"

"They shot Max," Lydia said.

"What? Who?" Willow immediately took the rifle off her back and descended the stairs. She stood behind them as they went up, watching the gate.

"A smoothskin," Lydia replied. "Wearing a dark blue uniform. Probably one of the same ones that you saw."

Willow backed up the stairs behind them, scanning the entryway. "Just the one?"

"Yeah. I think so. I didn't see anyone else."

"Could be more. They got away from us last time, the sneaky bastards."

They reached the street level and went inside the museum. Willow propped the door open and peered outside as she spoke. "Lydia, go get Barrows. I'll stay here in case anyone else comes up from there."

"No," Max said. "No, it's okay, I'm fine. You don't have to get Barrows."

"Don't be stupid," Willow said. "You got shot. You're gonna the wound cleaned out, at least. You're not invulnerable to infection like the rest of us. He'll do it for cheap. Might not even charge you at all."

"It's fine," Max repeated. Rather than being firm, his voice was almost pleading. "Look, it only grazed me. It's just a scratch. It's not even bleeding."

Willow raised her eyebrows. "Alright macho man, it's your leg." She returned her gaze beyond the doors.

"Do you see anyone?" Lydia asked.

"No, it's clear so far. You think anyone else knew you were there?"

"I don't think so," she replied as she stood on her toes to try to see out above Willow's shoulder. "We only saw one person."

"Is he dead?"

Her stomach twisted. "Yes."

"Who shot first?" Willow asked. She hadn't looked up.

"He shot at us."

"You weren't threatening him?"

Lydia blinked. _Were_ they being threatening? "No. We were there, but we weren't being aggressive. He ignored me when I tried to talk to him."

"Damn," the ghoul woman muttered. "They had to go and make trouble." She looked back at Lydia. "Why can't we all just get along?"

Lydia shrugged.

Willow looked back out the door. "Go get Harris. We've got work to do."


	4. Chapter 4

Lydia helped Max back to Tulip's shop upon his insistence that he not be taken to the Chop Shop. Tulip closed the store early, turning around her sign and placing a screen in front of the doorway. She fairly ignored Lydia after she told her what had happened, she was so absorbed in making sure Max was alright. Lydia was pretty sure that if there had been a door on the entryway, she would have shut it in her face.

She took the hint and left them alone. She didn't have any idea where Harris was. She wandered Underworld for a short while, sticking her head into the different rooms, scanning them for a familiar profile, and withdrawing.

After she'd checked everywhere else in the exhibit, she reluctantly went to the door to the Ninth Circle. Opening it slowly, she stepped halfway inside and looked to and fro. Straight ahead was a bar, none of the patrons of which turned around when she entered. The room curved around to the right, and Lydia leaned forward to see through to the other side. In the corner to the right was a table with two women sitting at it. Behind them was a tall ghoul with a shotgun who was busy kissing a smoothskin girl in a vault suit. Lydia blinked.

"He ain't here, girl," one of the women at the table said to her. She tapped her cigarette on the ashtray in the center of the table as she looked at her, then went back to talking with her friend.

She left the exhibit and went back into the room with the mammoth and the dinosaur skeleton. Willow turned when she heard the door open and close. Lydia shrugged at her. Willow shrugged back and looked back out the door, still watching the metro entrance.

Lydia checked the room where they slept, but it was empty. With a sigh, she went back into the large room. Finally she decided to check the Lincoln wing.

The ferals shuffled around near the entrance, as usual. They moaned and hissed quietly, but didn't bother Lydia as she hurried past them. As she reached the top of the stairs, she tripped over an inconveniently placed chunk of fallen ceiling and fell forward. She put out her hands to stop herself as she collided with the floor.

She climbed to her knees and looked at her hands. The right had a small bleeding scrape. She wiped it on her jeans and went to get to her feet, and saw there was someone standing in front of her. She looked up, and was met with the wide, clouded eyes of a feral ghoul staring at her, its deteriorated mouth hanging open. The thing stared at her. She walked quickly around it and into the hall beyond the landing, glancing back at it over her shoulder to make sure it wasn't coming after her. It followed her with its eyes, but thankfully stayed in its place.

She wound her way through the halls until she reached the very back of the wing. There the corridor opened up into a big room, and on the far wall was a crack near the ceiling that let in a slant of yellowish light from the evening sun. Under the fracture was Harris, sitting with his back against the wall and a book in his hands. He lowered it when she came in.

_Finally._ Lydia stopped and frowned at him. "What are you doing?"

"What does it look like?"

She went over and stood next to him. "You're reading?"

He rolled his eyes.

"I didn't know you read."

"You thought I was illiterate?"

"No, I meant, I didn't know you liked to read. I've never seen you doing it before."

"I'm usually busy." He shut the book. _The Once and Future King._ "Now that we've got nothing to do but wait for those humans to decide whether to attack..." he shrugged.

Lydia crossed her arms. "You won't have to wait much longer."

He gave her a sharp look. "What does that mean?"

"They already attacked."

Harris unfolded his legs and was on his feet in one seamless movement. "Where are they?"

"Calm down, they're not inside."

"Tell me what's going on."

"We ran into one of them in the subway tunnels. He started shooting when he saw us. He got Max in the leg, but he's okay."

"You're alright, too?"

"Yeah."

"What happened to the shooter?"

Lydia's shoulders drooped. She could feel the melancholy creeping into her face. She was afraid he was going to make her say it, but he understood without her speaking and moved on.

"Where did you find him?"

"Maybe a half a mile into the tunnel," she replied. "I think they're hiding out in a corridor down there. Let's get back to Willow and I can tell you both what happened."

When they were back with Willow at the front doors, Lydia told them both about the footprints that they'd followed to the maintenance room in the tunnel. Still no one had emerged from the metro. "I think it's safe to say you weren't followed," Willow said. "But I think we should have someone on watch all night, just in case. We can go down there tomorrow. I don't think we should bring anyone else, they'll just attract more attention. If it's just us, maybe we can find them before they know we're there. I'd still like to figure out what we're up against before we have to fight them."

"Do you know what 'SRB' means?" Lydia asked. "He had it on his uniform."

" 'SRB'? Never heard of it." Willow looked at Harris questioningly, but he shook his head. "What do you mean it was on his uniform? He painted it on?"

"No, it was on a patch shaped like a shield. It didn't look handmade."

"Probably pre-war, if they have uniforms with their acronym on it." Harris observed. "Could be that they just found the uniforms and they don't know what it stands for any more than we do."

"Could be," Willow said. "Either way, it sounds like this isn't just a ragtag group. They know what they're doing. We have to tread cautiously."

"Not that I'm against being careful, but that's a lot to assume from just the fact that they have uniforms," Lydia said.

"It's not just the uniforms," Willow said. She looked out the door again, adjusting her grip on her rifle, then turned back to Lydia. "I've lived here for some 60 years now. I probably don't have to tell you that I know the area pretty well. But those guys managed to keep out of sight for most of the time that they've been here, and they got away from Quinn and Harris and me when we were following them. They're not your run-of-the-mill raider or merc gang. Like I said, I think we should get ready tonight and go in tomorrow. Lydia, you'll have to fill us in on exactly where you went. We can't afford to go to the wrong place and have them ambush us."

"Okay, I'll show you the way tomorrow."

Willow glanced at Harris furtively. "No...just tell us now."

"But I can just..." Lydia trailed off. She looked at Harris. His face was not reassuring. "I'm going with you," she told them forcefully.

"No," Harris replied.

"Why?" she demanded.

"You know why."

"I can help," Lydia insisted.

Harris was quiet. Willow slowly blinked, looking back and forth between them.

"I'll tell you where they are if you let me go with you," Lydia said.

"No."

Lydia was pointedly silent.

"I can just ask the human kid if you won't tell us."

"Fine, then, go ask him."

"It's a mystery to me why you're so eager to risk your life for something that doesn't even involve you. Just stay here where you're safe."

"I don't want to be safe. I've been safe my whole life. I want to go."

Harris just stared at her in puzzlement. Lydia scowled and stalked back to the Resource Wars room.

The next day, her first groggy early-morning thought was that it was strange that Harris didn't wake her up. Usually he woke up earlier than her.

Then she remembered that he was leaving without her today.

She rolled over to look behind her, where Harris was sleeping. He was already gone. She stared at the spot where he'd been lying. She pushed herself up from the floor and picked her way across the rubble-strewn doorway and into the mammoth room. It was quiet. Judging by the small bit of sky visible behind the holes in the ceiling, it was midmorning. _What to do for the rest of the day?_

She went inside Underworld. There were a lot of people up and milling around the central room. It must have been later than she thought.

That woman with the makeup and the giant hat was standing next to the doors. She turned and looked down her nose at Lydia as she came in. "Hello, dear," she said in a distant, airy sort of voice. In one hand she held a long cigarette holder.

"Hello," Lydia said without looking up.

Ms. Rochelle sucked delicately on her cigarette. "You know, you have very pretty hair. Did that Snowdrift fellow upstairs cut it for you?"

"No," she replied, wondering distantly who Snowdrift was. She walked by Ms. Rochelle without bothering to finish the exchange and entered Underworld Outfitters, which was open again. Tulip smiled and said hello when she saw her. Apparently now that Max was dealt with, Lydia existed again.

"By yourself today, huh?" Tulip said. "Willow came in here earlier and said she and Harris were leaving."

"She told you that?"

"She asked us to entertain you while they were gone," she said with a smile. "It'll end up being the other way around, I'm sure."

_She asked them to babysit me?_ "Yeah," Lydia replied without looking at her. She glared at the wall.

Cerberus happened to be passing by the doorway, and it rotated in place to face her. Its jets fluttered. "Assessing threat..." it said.

"Oh, be quiet," she told it. She wondered what made it stop, and realized how tense she was, her hands bunched at her sides. She tried to relax her posture a bit and went to sit on the rug in front of the counter. "I hate robots," she muttered.

Tulip raised an eyebrow. "Is that so?"

Lydia sighed and shrugged. "No. I don't know. It's just a machine." She sat back against the wall and looked up tentatively. Max was standing at the workbench behind Tulip, watching with the wide-eyed gaze that was typical of him.

"They'll be back soon," Tulip said. "Willow said it'd take less than a day. Maybe sometime tonight they'll be back?"

Lydia nodded. She looked up. Max had gone back to work on what looked like a disassembled coffee maker.

"Max?" she said.

He turned to look at her immediately. "Yes?"

"How's your leg?"

"Fine, thanks."

"Are you sure you don't want anyone to look at it?"

"Yes, thanks." He nodded to her hands. "You've been injured."

Lydia looked at her scraped palms. "That's just from earlier. They're fine." She looked up at Max. "You can see that from all the way over there?"

"I have very good eyesight. Remember?"

"Yeah, I guess you do," Lydia agreed. "Tulip, I don't suppose you ever have flashlights in stock?"

Tulip tapped a finger on her peeling chin. "Actually..." She went around and dug in a drawer behind the counter, then held up a big black metal flashlight-the kind police used to use. "Like this?"

"Yes."

"You want it?"

Lydia bit her lip. She had five caps. She still had a difficult time judging monetary values, but she was pretty sure the flashlight would be worth at least twice that. She shook her head. "The only money I have is what you gave me the other day."

"Hm," Tulip said. She tilted the flashlight around in a circle idly as she thought. Then she went over to Lydia and held it out to her. She held out her other hand for money.

Lydia looked up at her in confusion. "Five caps for that?"

"And another story."

Lydia took the small collection of caps from her pocket and placed them in Tulip's hand, then took the flashlight from her. She clicked it on and off experimentally. The batteries still worked. She turned it off and clipped it to her belt loop.

Tulip put the caps down and hopped up to sit on the countertop. "You were going to tell us about Icarus, I think."

They talked for an hour or so. After that she spent the rest of the day wandering around the museum, venturing outside only once or twice. She spent a great deal of time slouching on her bench in the shadow of the column and listening in on the conversations around her, as she had on her first day in Underworld.

She didn't think she would ever find a place whose citizens rivaled those of the vault in their capacity to be annoying, but Underworld came close. While the atmosphere in the vault was always eerily cheerful, Underworld seemed largely devoid of joy. All anyone ever seemed to do was complain about the condition of the museum, about the brotherhood or the super mutants, about the patrons of the Ninth Circle, about being a ghoul. _Never thought I'd say it, but I think this place could use a few Beatrice Armstrongs. No wonder Harris doesn't like it in here._ Then, having inadvertently reminded herself of Harris, her bad mood deepened.

Finally she went upstairs. She still hadn't talked to Carol, so she decided to do so then.

She had been afraid that the woman would be so tired of answering the same questions over and over to progressively younger generations over the years that she wouldn't even want to think about telling her story again. Fortunately, she was enthusiastic enough about having someone new around that she was willing to talk to her. Lydia lost track of time as they talked. It must have been hours. She told her about driving on the highway, about shopping in grocery stores, about the way grass felt, and about rain. Carol reminded her that it did still rain sometimes, but Lydia was particularly interested in it nonetheless. _Water falling from the sky._ She'd seen it in movies, but hearing it described by someone who had felt and smelled and heard it was different.

"When it rains and you're inside, you can hear it pounding on the roof. It sounds like hundreds of fingers drumming on the ceiling."

It sounded pretty creepy, honestly.

As she was leaving Carol's, Lydia went to the left to go out the other door. She passed a woman in a pink dress who was taking food orders. She looked up as Lydia passed. "Hey. You," she said, interrupting the man who was giving her his order. She spoke loud enough that she could hear but quietly enough that Carol couldn't. "Carol's with me. Don't get any ideas. Understand?" She gave Lydia a subtle but fierce look.

_Thanks for the advice, but 200 year old women aren't really my thing._ "I wasn't."

"Just so we're clear." She seemed satisfied with that answer, and went back to her customers.

Lydia rolled her eyes to herself. She was about to open the doors to leave when someone else grabbed her arm.

"Hey, kid," said a man's voice.

She could see his shadow on the door, and felt him behind her. On impulse, she violently shook her arm to make him let go. "What?" she snapped.

The man's face changed from slightly annoyed to outraged. "What, I'm not pretty enough to touch you?"

Lydia groaned and turned to leave.

"Hey! Wait. You're that kid Harris is toting around, aren't you?"

"He's not-" She sighed. "Yes, that's me."

"I'm Crowley. I need you to talk to him for me."

"Yeah? About what?"

"About killing someone for me."

That shocked Lydia enough that, for a moment, she was speechless. "What?"

"You ever heard of this guy called Allistair Tenpenny?"

"No."

"You're lucky, then. He's the biggest asshole you'll ever meet. A bigot. He needs to die."

"Just for being a bigot?"

"What do you mean 'just'? He's a fat cat bastard who shares his cash with everyone but us ghouls. People like him are the reason we're stuck inside this shithole museum. Just get him to do it for me, okay kid? I can pay well."

"He's not a mercenary," Lydia said.

"That's not what I hear."

She reached behind her to open the door, unsure how to reply to that.

"Ask him, alright? Somebody's got to do it. Might as well be him. One-hundred caps."

Lydia went outside. On the other side of the door, she paused. _'That's not what I hear'?_

No one else interrupted her as she was leaving, and she finally managed to get out of the establishment. She was out in the mammoth room when something else stopped her before she got back the Resource Wars room. There was a noise, like talking or breathing. It was very quiet, but she could just make it out, coming from behind the doors to the Lincoln room.

She followed the sound. _Probably just the ferals._ When she went inside, the zombie-like creatures were wandering around the stairs, but quietly. The source of the noise was somewhere else. She could hear it clearly now. Someone was crying. Lydia followed the sound into the room to the right. In the doorway, she stopped in surprise.

Ms. Rochelle was seated on a bench in the middle of the next room. Her shoulders shook. She looked up at Lydia when she appeared in the entrance. Her makeup was smeared and streaked horribly, making her look-if possible-even worse than usual. She straightened, taking a square of cloth out of her purse and dabbing at her eyes with it. "Well?" she asked. "What do you want?"

"Ah...nothing. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to barge in like that." She was about to back out of the room, but Rochelle spoke before she could.

"I hate this place."

Lydia watched the woman, desperately wanting to leave but glued in place by conventions of polite society.

"I hate everyone here. I hate being like this. I hate being around _other_ people who look like this." She sniffed, and looked at Lydia longingly. "You're so lovely."

"Oh, I don't-"

"Did you come here just to torment me? Is that it?" she said despondently.

"No."

The woman didn't seem to hear her. She looked down at her hands, running the fingers of one hand over the other in an attempt to smooth out hangnails and nails that were cracked nearly in half. "I used to be as beautiful as you." She gave Lydia a quick glance up and down. "More than _you_ ," she snorted. "I was married to a rich man, lived in a penthouse suite in a skyscraper. I had nice things. Friends. For 50 years. Then _this_ happened."

"What happened?" Lydia asked, curiosity getting the better of her. "After you changed?"

"What do you think happened, child? They made me leave. Can't have ghouls in the tower, it would turn everyone's stomachs." She sighed and waved her away. "Just leave me, please."

Ms. Rochelle put her face in her handkerchief and sniffed quietly. Lydia withdrew from the room gratefully.

-lll-

She had fallen asleep by the time Harris got back to the Resource Wars room. She woke up at the sounds of cement gravel grinding under his feet.

He stood in the entrance for a moment, looking down at her silently. She could just make him out in the darkness. He went to the spot where he slept and sat down.

"Well?" Lydia said.

Harris turned to look down at her. "I thought you were asleep."

"I'm not."

He reached over his head to remove the rifle from his back. "Well what?"

"What happened?"

"They were gone. They'd cleared out by the time we got there. We don't know where they are now."

Lydia propped herself up on her elbows. "Maybe you went the wrong way."

"No. We saw the footprints. It was the same place you found."

"So what are you going to do now?"

"We're going out again tomorrow. Hopefully they've gone, but if not, we need to find them."

Lydia opened her mouth, then closed it again. "You can't just leave me here," she said finally.

Harris didn't reply. Lydia drummed her fingertips on the floor. It was hard enough going back to the vault last month. The whole time she was there, she had a nagging worry that he might not be there when she came out. She didn't know what she'd do if that was the case, because she couldn't survive out there on her own. Even if she stayed in the vault, it wouldn't be long before she started looking worse and they kicked her out.

And now he was going off and doing things like this without her. He was probably remembering how nice it was not to have to drag her around everywhere. It was only a matter of time before he left and never came back. She knew she had no right to complain about it. The benefits of this relationship went largely in one direction, and it wasn't his. They both knew it.

It was quiet for a minute, and the sound of Lydia's tapping fingers filled the room. She stopped as she noticed the noise.

"I'm not going to leave you here," Harris said. "But you cannot come with us tomorrow. You won't be able to help. In fact you'll probably get in the way. And there's a chance you'll be injured, or worse."

"Don't you think it's _my_ responsibility to decide when to take that chance and when not to?" Lydia said.

"You don't seem to be able to make appropriate decisions in that regard."

She glared at him. He looked back expressionlessly. Lydia lay indignantly back on the floor and rolled to face away from him.


	5. Chapter 5

There was a small noise. For the sixth time that night, Lydia opened her eyes. In her view was part of the wall and a familiar pile of debris, lit by dim light from the mammoth room. She could hear Harris moving behind her. He stepped over her, and she quickly closed her eyes again.

She listened to his footsteps, first crunching over gravel, then tapping softly on the marble floor of the room beyond, slowly fading until there was silence again. She waited a long time without moving. It was difficult to keep track of time without her Pip-Boy. She counted her breaths. After 70, she sat up and peered around the corner into the other room. It was still. She couldn't see anyone.

She brushed herself off and stepped gingerly over the pile in front of the doorway. A piece of cement slid down and rolled across the floor, but there was no one there to hear it.

Dragging open the front door to the museum a crack, Lydia peered outside and looked side to side at the plaza beyond. In the distance she could see the super mutants lurching through the trenches. There was little movement nearby other than loose bits of garbage skittering over the ground in the wind. Lydia closed the door and silently made her way into the metro station.

When she got to the mouth of the northbound tunnel, she snapped on her flashlight. There were three settings-low, medium, and high. She turned the switch to the lowest setting and started down the path on the side of the tunnel. There were many more footprints now, from her and Max and Willow and Harris going up and down the walkway. They weren't really distinguishable as individual prints now, and it was hard to tell whose were whose.

She went as quickly and quietly as she could down the track. She hoped to catch up to Harris and Willow, but she walked for a long time without seeing any sign of them. It had occurred to her that they might not have even gone this way. Maybe they had already searched this area enough and had moved on to another tunnel. But then, after what seemed like forever, she caught sight of a moving circle of dim light ahead. She quickly shut off her own light and stopped to listen. She could make out two figures speaking in low voices that obviously belonged to ghouls.

She waited a while for them to get a little farther ahead before she started following again, just to make sure they didn't hear her. _Now what?_ She frowned. For some reason, earlier she'd imagined herself leaping out of the dark in the nick of time to save them from some raider or SRB person. _Ridiculous._ Maybe for now she'd just wait and watch. They might need her, they might not. Either way, she wanted to be there to see what happened.

She weaved back and forth in the tunnel to stay out of reach of the lamps that occasionally dotted the ceiling and walls, bathing the grey concrete of the subway in flickering light. All the while she carefully avoided cracks and rocks so she wouldn't trip or make noise as she walked. The light of the flashlight ahead faded in and out of view with the curves of the tunnel walls.

After another few minutes, the light disappeared around a curve, but as Lydia neared the bend, it didn't reappear. She paused. The next part of the tunnel was very dark. She couldn't see their flashlight ahead, and she heard nothing. Fearing they had gotten too far ahead of her, she stepped into the darkness, tracing her hand over the wall to feel her way forward.

She'd taken perhaps ten steps when her hand suddenly touched fabric. In the next few moments, a lot of things happened very fast. Before she could react, or decide whether it was Harris, Willow, or someone else, she was thrown against the wall and a hand tightly gripped her right wrist. Whoever it was, they had wrongly assumed that she was right handed. She ripped out her laser pistol with her left hand, but her fingers hesitated on the trigger. What if it _was_ Willow or Harris? Then all at once there was a gun under her chin, forcing her head back against the wall. "Don't!" she cried. She braced herself, squeezing her eyes shut, but she couldn't bring herself to fire.

When she yelled, the person paused, and then the pressure on her arm and jaw lessened. "Lydia," Harris growled.

From the middle of the tunnel, on the tracks, there was a click, and a bright light shone in Lydia's face. She squinted. Harris withdrew his gun and let go of her arm.

She tried to keep herself from shaking as the light bobbed and moved to point at the ground in front of her so she could see. She flicked on the safety of her own gun and put it away.

"Go back to Underworld," Harris said. He turned and began walking down the tunnel away from her.

"No," said Willow from behind the flashlight. "It's probably safer now if she just stays with us. They could be behind us."

Harris didn't look happy, but he didn't argue, and they started down the tunnel again.

"I think we need to communicate better," Lydia said after a moment, quoting something she'd frequently overheard Gloria Mack saying to her husband.

"You think?" Harris said back. He didn't sound as though he'd appreciated the joke.

Willow walked next to her. "In the future, maybe don't sneak up on people who are expecting to be attacked," she said helpfully.

Lydia didn't respond. Willow flicked the flashlight off, and it was pitch black again. She moved behind Lydia so she could feel her way along the wall as well. "He said you were gonna do this," she said quietly. Lydia could hear the smile in her voice.

"He knew it was me?" Lydia asked. Her heart was still pounding out of her chest.

"No. Coulda been one of those other guys just as easily as it could've been you. The reason you're not dead is because we couldn't be sure. You know the one rule that can save your life in the Wastes, Lydia?"

"No."

" 'Keep a hand on your knife'. You oughta remember that."

They went quietly through the tunnel, and finally a dim light on the wall relieved the darkness. They had reached the employees-only door. There had been no sign of the body Lydia and Max left behind last time they were there. Lydia mentioned this.

"It's obvious they're trying to keep a low profile," Willow said in a low voice. "They probably moved it away so no one else would stumble across it."

There was a spot in front of the doorway that was relatively clear of dust. It had been disturbed, but there were no footprints there now. "They brushed them away," Willow said.

Willow shone her light on the path ahead of the door's inlet. "There aren't any trails leading away, either, see? They figured out their mistake after they ran into you. Probably they're walking on the gravel now." She waved her light over the tracks, and the older ghouls started forward again.

"What about-" Lydia started. Someone shushed her, and she lowered her voice. "What about through the door? What's in there?"

"We searched there yesterday," Harris told her. "It's a dead end."

"Can I see?"

Willow shrugged, and they went inside. Given her last experience in this location, Lydia half expected to be greeted with the barrel of a plasma rifle when they opened the door, but the room beyond was empty. It looked much like the rest of the subway-grey, water-stained walls lined with piping and wires and dim lights, some of which were still working. One corner was dark where a fluorescent tube had cracked and fallen out of its fixture, dangling by a short tangle of cords. It swayed to and fro in the suction of air formed by the door suddenly opening. The top few layers of a wad of papers on a desk scattered. Lydia picked up a sheet, but it was unreadable. Pre-war, probably. She dropped it and looked around the room. There was only a pencil in the drawers of the desk. On the wall above the desk was a large frame that may have once held a poster or photograph, but it had been ripped away. There were no more footprints.

Lydia moved on to the next room. It was different-smaller, and the floor was composed of rectangular metal panels-but similarly stark. Against one wall was a locker containing a toolbox, a jumpsuit with the name 'Hal' embroidered on the chest, and several empty clothing hangers. There was another desk, and on top of this one was a computer. Harris and Willow watched as she leaned down to turn on the computer. There wasn't so much as a flicker on the screen when she pushed the power button. She leaned back in disappointment.

"Ready to go?" Willow asked.

"I guess," It really was a dead end. It was an awful lot smaller than she'd thought it would be. She had envisioned a labyrinth of tunnels branching off from the room, mysterious uniformed men with glowing guns prowling the halls. "Don't you think it's strange that it's so small? How did they all fit in here?"

"There's no reason to believe that they limited themselves to these two rooms," Harris said. "They probably branched out farther up the tunnel."

"But the footprints stopped here," Lydia replied. "There _weren't_ any going farther up when we came down here the first time." She looked around the room again.

Then she saw it. She pointed to a ten-digit keypad on the wall behind the desk. "Didn't you see that last time you were here?"

The leather-clad woman nodded once. "It's for the safe." She pointed to the ground behind the desk.

Lydia saw that there was indeed a safe sitting on the ground. She looked at it briefly, then shook her head. "The safe is connected to the computer. There were a bunch of keypads just like this in the vault. They're for doors." She held down the one, three, and zero buttons for several seconds, then typed in a very long string of numbers-the password reset code for this particular brand of lock. The code that only Vault-Tec engineers and maintenance workers were supposed to know. As she finished, a small light in the corner of the keypad flashed red several times.

_Maybe 380 at the end, not 830.._. It had been a while since she'd had to do this. On the third try, the light flashed steady green. _Ready for a new password._ Upon a sudden onset of nostalgia, Lydia typed in the first code she'd ever used when she reset one of these locks in the vault. _That, Mr. Almodovar, is why you don't leave Vault-Tec operations manuals lying around in boxes in unlocked storage rooms._

She pressed the enter button and typed in the new password. One of the panels on the floor near her dropped down slightly, then moved to the side to reveal a stairway descending below the floor. Willow gaped. Lydia smiled, basking in this small victory, but Willow and Harris were already hurrying down the stairway, paying no attention to her. She went after them, not wanting to be left behind.

There was a cool draft going up the stairs, and Lydia shivered as they went down. It was October now. It was getting colder, and it was even worse underground. The others didn't seem to notice.

At the bottom of the stairs was a long hallway with a line of fluorescent lights going down the length of it. Harris motioned for Lydia to stay quiet and flipped his rifle down from his shoulder to hold it at the ready. She followed suit. They wouldn't be speaking beyond this point.

They went slowly and silently down the corridor. There were no doors along the length of it. At the end of the hall was a spacious room with a light that buzzed loudly and flickered on and off, casting oddly-shaped shadows on the walls and ceiling. The room seemed to be empty, but there were two more hallways and a door leading out of it.

They stopped and were quiet for a minute, listening. Lydia couldn't hear anything besides the crackling of the light. Willow jerked her head toward the corridor on the right, and they followed her into it. As they were turning into the hall, Lydia craned her neck to see around the larger figures in front of her. Suddenly a loud noise split the silence, and they all jumped. She'd accidentally kicked a metal bucket with a mop in it that was sitting against the wall. She blushed as they turned around, giving them an apologetic look. Neither bothered to scold her. They all listened for a moment to see if there was anyone else nearby who would respond to the sound, but there was nothing. They continued.

The hall went in a circle, leading around to several rooms on the way. There were more passageways branching off of those, and they searched each as they came to it. They were all empty except for a few roaches. It took a long time, and Lydia had to remind herself several times to not let her guard down. They could be attacked any moment.

There was another hall. And another after that. They wound their way through a seemingly endless maze of rooms, and Lydia was beginning to get bored when they came upon another locked door. It stayed resolutely shut when Harris tapped the release. There was a terminal on a desk near the door, and this one wasn't broken. The screen was turned on, quivering slightly, but still in working order. She could see a cord going from the computer, up the wall and into a box next to the door release.

Lydia sat down on the edge of the seat in front of the desk, facing away from the door. The screen displayed several long columns of text. It was a familiar scene, though she had not had to hack terminals as often as she'd reset the keypad locks. She'd only done it successfully several times. It was more difficult, but not impossible. She leaned forward to read the small, rapidly blinking green text. She knew there would be many words on the screen amidst the gibberish letters and symbols, but they were hard to find.

Willow lingered by the door, but Harris padded over to stand beside her, giving her a questioning look. "I'll try to unlock it," Lydia whispered. "It might take a minute. I have to..."

It would take too long to explain how to hack the terminal, and he didn't need to know, necessarily, so she just shrugged and turned back to the screen. But then he bent down to look at the screen with her, leaning his hand on the desk while keeping the other on his rifle. "How do you do it?"

Lydia blinked up at him. Then, testing his mood, she whispered back, "Hey, you shoot things, I unlock things. Let's stick to our own jobs, alright?"

"Couldn't hurt to have help," he said quietly.

"Yeah. Couldn't hurt for either of us to have some help, maybe?"

Harris stared at her. He slowly shrugged in what may or may not have been a concession.

Lydia looked at the screen. "I need to find the password, in here somewhere. It'll be one of the words..." She quickly lost herself in the text, trailing off. Her eyes darted across the columns for a few minutes before she settled on a pattern she saw. She typed in a word, but it failed. After a minute, she tried another one. _Entry denied_. Only two more attempts before it locked her out. She rethought the pattern, looking at the text carefully. "Tell me if you see one that starts with 'c' and ends in 'ed'," she said to Harris.

He leaned closer to look, then pointed to a word in the lower left corner. _Changed._ _That could work._ Lydia typed it in hopefully, but it was another dud. The screen flashed a warning that this was her last try before she would be logged out. She frowned at the screen. Harris tapped the other edge of the display. _Charged._ Lydia nodded. She poised her fingers over the keyboard, scanning the screen one last time for a better choice, but none showed itself. She typed in the word. _Exact match._ She logged in and unlocked the door. It opened without further prompting.

As Lydia turned to look, there was a gunshot, and she jumped a foot in the air. She stumbled out of the chair and dove behind the wall beside the door as Harris immediately crouched down and returned fire. There were several metallic sounds and several squishier ones when the rifle's shells hit various materials, and then a small gasp and the unmistakable sound of a body falling to the floor.

Harris moved to the wall next to Lydia, never taking his eyes from the doorway. He made several hand signals in Willow's direction that Lydia didn't understand, but the other woman seemed to. With her back to the wall, Willow peered around the edge of the doorway. Lydia strained her ears, and after a few long, still moments, she heard the soft sound of cloth moving against stone.

Willow aimed her rifle around the corner. "Stay down," she said to the person, but they kept moving. "I said _stay down_ if you wanna leave here alive!" The movement continued. She swore, and fired. There was no more sound.

Willow ducked around the corner and approached the body.

"Stay here," Harris told Lydia as he followed Willow. "Please." She hated to admit it, but this time she was happy to oblige. She leaned timidly around the corner to watch them. Outside the door was another long hallway. There was no cover except for a few more doorways along the walls. Most of the lights in the hall had gone out, and the opposite end faded into blackness.

Harris and Willow bent over the man on the ground. His eyes were closed, and his right hand was closed tightly around a plasma pistol. There were several holes in his chest, and a laser burn in his forehead. The wounds in his chest were a signature of Harris's-Lydia saw those ragged holes in the corpses of everyone he fought. But something was off about these ones.

They were clean.

"Where's the blood?" Willow murmured.

Then the corpse twitched. Its eyes shot open, and it raised its weapon. Lydia gasped. The older ghouls leaped back and fired at the same time, many more times than they probably needed to. The man collapsed-again.

They all stared at the man. There was a long time where no one spoke. Then there were quiet, hurried footsteps coming from the room at the end of the hall. Spurred into action by the sound, Harris and Willow took the body up under its arms and dragged it back into the room with the terminal. There was still no blood, and he left no trail as they moved him away.

"Jesus Christ, he's heavy," Willow muttered. They dropped the man on the floor behind the wall. "Watch him," Willow told Lydia. "If he so much as looks like he's gonna move, give him a good dose of laser." Lydia swallowed and nodded, and they moved back to their positions on either side of the door.

Lydia could hear very small noises at the other end of the hall. There were no voices, but it sounded like more than one person. After a minute, they began running down the hall in short intervals, probably going from doorway to doorway to minimize their exposure.

"Hello," a woman called to them. Harris and Willow exchanged glances. She knew what they were thinking. Why were they trying to talk _now_?

"Listen, we don't want any bloodshed, but we'll do what we have to to defend ourselves," the woman said when no one answered. Lydia could hear more quiet footsteps. _There are a lot of them._ The woman paused, as though waiting for a response. When none came, she clarified, "Let's just talk for now, alright?"

_They want to know who we are,_ Lydia realized. _They know we're more than just raiders. They know we're a threat because we found them here. Otherwise they'd just shoot._

"I'd be glad to, if your men would stop advancing," Willow replied. They sounded like they were about halfway down the hallway now.

"Fair enough," the woman said, and the other footsteps ceased. "My name's Elle. Could I ask who I'm speaking to?"

"You could," Willow said.

Elle continued when she realized Willow wasn't going to give her name. "Do you mind telling me what you're doing out here?"

_"_ You're part of the SRB?" she asked, ignoring the question.

There was a pause at the other end of the hall. "...Yes, I am."

"What's that stand for?"

"That's confidential. Can I ask if you're alone right now?"

" Your men have shot on sight every time I've come across them. I'm curious as to why that is."

"I apologize. They must have mistaken you for a feral ghoul."

Willow raised an eyebrow at Lydia and Harris. It was a rather weak lie.

"I have to wonder what you're trying to do here," Elle said. "I hope you didn't come looking for a fight over an honest mistake."

"That's a deadly mistake," Willow replied. "I take that kind of thing personally. If you come to Underworld and start shooting because you see a ghoul, that's a problem. And if your people don't stay where they are, _I'm_ going to start shooting."

They had been moving again, quieter than before, but they stopped at Willow's threat. "Come on now," Elle said. "You don't want to do that. You're outnumbered. Why don't you come out where we can talk face to face? No weapons."

Willow rolled her eyes. "I don't think so."

"You're going to have to trust me if we're going to resolve this." They were moving again. They were very close now, though the talkative woman was still at the other end of the hall. Willow didn't reply this time, but looked over at Harris. He nodded and motioned for Lydia to stay put. Willow held up three fingers, then two, then one.

They both leapt around the corner, crouched low, shooting. Lydia couldn't see what was happening, but there was a great deal of shooting and yelling and movement for several seconds, and then Harris and Willow were jumping back around the corner, next to her. Willow continued to shoot around the wall. Harris was pulling someone with him. He'd gotten him off balance, and the person could only stumble along with him in surprise. Harris yanked his arm downward while sweeping a foot under his legs, and the man fell to the ground ungracefully. Harris knelt on the man's back and pressed the end of his rifle against his the base of his skull. The man flinched, his face twisted up in fear. Lydia couldn't help feeling sympathy for the prone man. That was probably what she looked like a good deal of the time.

"Lydia, take his gun," Harris said. She quickly bent and took it out of his hand. "Tell them to back off," Harris said to the man. "Do you hear me? Do it."

The man on the ground paused, and Harris leaned on him harder. The man gritted his teeth, then croaked out, "St-stop." It was barely audible, and he said again, loudly, to be heard over the gunfire, "Stop! Stay back! There are three of them! They'll shoot me!" He waited for a response, and got none but the continuing footsteps behind the doorway. They weren't going to stop.

Willow darted forward and hit the release to close the door, then moved to the computer to lock it. There was loud pounding from the other side.

"Keep your gun on him for a minute," Harris said to Lydia. When she looked blankly at him, he pulled her left hand down until her pistol was pressed against the man's neck like his had been. Now that he had moved out of the way, Lydia could see that the man was wearing a slave collar.

"Harris," Lydia said whispered. "He's a slave."

He patted down the man on the floor, removing a knife and ammo from his pockets. "I know. Don't move your gun," he replied without looking up.

"I'm not," Lydia assured him. Harris reached into one of his own pockets, drawing out a long, thin strip of white plastic. He put one end of the strip into a hole in the other end, then pulled the man's hands behind his back and tightened the strip around them. Lydia felt sick, but she held her gun steady. The man turned his head a fraction, and Lydia pressed the gun against him threateningly. He froze, but then Lydia saw a jagged white line running along the side of his neck, curving up to touch his jawline. She pulled the gun away slightly to look at it. After a moment, he slowly turned to look up at her. It was only then that she saw a familiar face behind his mop of unkempt hair, patchy beard, and many layers of dirt.

"They don't care about me," said the man who, less than two months prior, had been marching Harris and Lydia off to Paradise Falls. "I'm worth nothing compared to what they're after. They'll let you kill me."

Harris waved Lydia away and hauled Andy up by one of his bound arms. "You have no idea what you're up against," Andy said urgently. Harris glanced at his face, and he seemed to recognize him now, too. "You have to leave, now."

"That's what we're planning on, kid," Willow said.

"How long do you think that will hold them off?" Lydia asked, indicating the door.

"There might be another way around," Willow said. "Or they could probably bludgeon their way through the door if given enough time. We should get going." There was an oddly loud thump as someone banged on the door from the other side.

Harris shoved Andy in front of him, and they hurried back through the hallways, not quite running because Andy couldn't move very fast with his hands behind his back. Willow led the way. It was a good thing she'd been paying attention on their way there. Lydia would have been completely lost if she were by herself.

After a minute of quiet, Andy spoke up. "The irony is not lost on me," he said quietly, "and I believe I know what you're going to say, but I still have to ask if you will please take this collar off."

"Don't worry, kid," Willow said. "You show us you're really not loyal to those assholes, and we'll try to get you out of that thing."

"No, we won't," Harris said. "The kid is a slaver. One of the ones we ran into a couple months ago."

Willow looked curiously over her shoulder at Andy, then chuckled hoarsely. "That _is_ ironic."

"I'm not anymore," Andy said defensively.

"I can see that," Willow said.

"They have a remote detonator for the collar. I told you, I'm worth nothing compared to..." He stopped, withholding the information he knew was his only leverage with them. "If they think I'm going to tell you about them-which they do, and I will-they'll try to kill me before I can tell you. If they think I'm going to endanger their chance of getting what they're looking for, they'll sacrifice me in a second. I'm not asking you to let me go, just get the collar off."

"If he dies, we'll know nothing more, and this will all have been a waste of time," Lydia pointed out.

Harris and Willow stopped and looked back at them both. "He's making it up," Harris said. "Slaves can sell for a thousand caps. No one's going to buy one just to kill him."

"No," Andy insisted, "they will. You don't understand..." He lowered voice his voice. "What they want is worth a _million_ caps."

The older ghouls stared at him.

"There was a toolbox back there, in that first room," Lydia said. "I bet there's a screwdriver and wire cutters in there."

"What if it detonates it while you're working on it?" Harris asked.

"We'd better hurry so that doesn't happen," Lydia replied, pushing past him and hurrying down the last hallway and up the stairs into the room with the door in the floor. She opened the toolbox. Sure enough, it contained everything she needed to remove the collar. _Now I just hope I remember how._ "Are they coming yet?" she asked Willow.

"Dunno. I haven't heard anything nearby, but I'm sure they're working their way over here somehow."

Lydia nodded once. "Andy, come here." The ex-slaver knelt in front of her where she could see the collar. She went to work.

She didn't have much trouble. It was easier than she remembered. Or maybe she was just getting better at it. The collar clicked open, and she quickly took it off and threw it in the corner of the room, in case it did decide to explode. She pocketed the tools.

Andy let out a shaky breath and smiled. "Thank you."

Harris moved toward the subway tunnel. "Come on. We need to go before they come back."

Not a minute into the tunnel, they heard the distant, small sound of the collar exploding in the halls behind them.


	6. Chapter 6

Willow remained just behind the doors of the museum again. She told Lydia to get Cerberus. She went to do so, but stopped when Harris started moving Andy in another direction.

"Where are you going with him?" Lydia asked.

Harris nodded to the Lincoln archway.

"What about the ferals?"

"I'll deal with them."

Lydia hesitated. Last time Harris was with Andy, he'd only barely been persuaded not to kill him. She was afraid of what would happen if she left them alone. "Wait for me," she said. Harris stopped, crossing his arms. Lydia ran into Underworld to get Cerberus, who grudgingly obeyed her request to meet Willow, muttering something about pansy civilians. The robot floated out to the museum entrance as Lydia walked over to meet Harris and Andy.

"Fire in the hole," Harris said in Willow's direction as he turned to the Lincoln wing.

"What does that mean?" Lydia asked as they entered the dark room. There were several feral ghouls around, on or behind the stairs. They perked up when the visitors entered, and immediately hurtled toward them. Andy flinched, and Harris moved in front of him and Lydia. He drew his handgun and shot one of the ghouls in the head, then another. Maybe the third ghoul was not as far gone as the others, because when they went down it shied away, backing around the stairs.

"Oh," Lydia said quietly.

"That way," Harris said, gesturing to the left. Andy went in front of them, glancing back at the shadows around the staircases to make sure there were no more creatures waiting to leap upon him. Lydia saw several figures receding into the darkness. They left them alone.

"I've never seen them do that before," Andy said. "Back away like that. Is it because you're here? I hear they don't attack other ghouls, even if they're not feral."

They reached a door and Harris opened it for them. He nodded inside, not bothering to answer Andy. The smoothskin looked inside suspiciously, then shuffled through the door. It was a closed off room with only one door. It looked like it may have been an office in the past, but it was completely empty now.

Harris told Andy to sit. He moved to the opposite wall and slid down it into a cross-legged position.

There was a pause. Harris stared at Andy. "Are you going to start talking, or are you going to be difficult?"

Andy looked back levelly. "I'm not going to be 'difficult'. I've given you no reason think that."

"Then get going. I haven't got all day."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

"Everything?"

"Start from when we last saw you."

Andy settled himself back against the wall. "I went back to Paradise Falls," he said. "Against my better judgment. I was almost out of ammunition, and it was nearby. I didn't really have any other choice. I thought I'd just go back to get the doctor to check me out, get bullets and wash all the blood out of my clothes, then leave quietly. But Grouse was there when I got to the gate. He was not happy to see me empty-handed. That damn woman..." An irritated look came over him. "You saw what she was like. She ended up killing half the people we caught. Since I was partnered with her, I got half the blame. The collars we put on you two were the third and fourth ones that we lost. And then the mesmetron was gone, too. I guess they thought I'd be worth more if they just sold me than if they let me keep losing or destroying their things."

"My condolences," Harris said dryly.

Andy gave him a rueful smile and continued. "I wasn't there for very much longer. A few days after that these three people came along, wearing...this." He looked down at his own uniform. "They bought two of us, then took us back to their camp, where there were more of them. Fifteen, maybe. There were a few other slaves. At first I couldn't tell what was going on. The people who bought us hardly noticed our presence. But I spoke to the other slaves and after a while I figured out the gist of it. They came from the Institute. Have you heard of it?"

Harris nodded and Lydia shook her head.

"It's an organization in the Commonwealth, up north," he said to her. "From the sound of it, a lot of rich scientists restore old technology and use it to make new stuff, then sell it and use the money to invent more things. I'd heard of them before, but I never thought it would be anything like this. I never imagined technology like this could exist, even before the war."

He paused to clear his throat. Harris and Lydia were patiently silent. "Something they made was lost-or stolen, I don't know-and they're trying to get it back. They needed cheap manpower. That's what we were for. They put us on the front lines, like you saw, so they could hide behind us."

"I don't understand why they would give you guns," Lydia said. "That seems like a bad idea."

Andy shrugged. "It's not unusual for people to use slaves in that manner. We all knew there wasn't much we could do against all of them, even if we were armed. Even if we managed to get a few of them, the rest would kill us before we got very far. And then we'd still be wearing the collars."

"What's this thing they lost?" Harris asked.

For the first time since he'd started speaking, Andy hesitated, looking a little nervous. He lowered his voice.

"An android."

Harris narrowed his eyes.

"An android?" Lydia repeated.

"A synthetic human. A robot," Andy said. "They call them synths."

"How many of these androids do they have?" Harris asked.

"I don't know. At least a few of the people there were synths. It's hard to tell." He glanced back and forth between Harris and Lydia. "You...believe me, then?"

"We killed one of them," Lydia said as it dawned on her. "It didn't bleed."

Andy nodded. "There are other kinds that will bleed. Some are completely indistinguishable from humans. It could be that everyone there excepting me was one of them."

"What else do you know about them?" Harris said.

As he thought, Andy shifted his weight, stretching his arms uncomfortably. "They seem to vary a lot from individual to individual. They're strong, or at least some of them are. I saw one of them punch through a cement wall. He didn't even blink. I don't know that they can feel pain." He shrugged. "Maybe the more human-like ones can. They don't seem to be able to shoot very well, though. I've seen them do it a few times, when we were fighting raiders and the like. I think my aim is better. They usually hit their targets eventually, but not until they were up close, or after a few tries. Maybe that kind of thing is hard to do when you're a computer. I'm sure they'd do better if they just fought hand-to-hand, but the Institute people baby them. I think they're afraid of them getting broken, despite how tough they are." He smiled at them. "They must be having a fit over the one you killed."

"What about the one they're looking for?" Lydia asked him. "Do you know anything else about that?"

"Not much. I've heard them talking a little bit. They think it's somewhere around Underworld, as you probably guessed. I don't know what it looks like or what it was built for."

Lydia didn't need a description. Though she was having a hard time wrapping her mind around the conclusion, there was only really one person it could be. She doubted they built androids that looked like ghouls.

"What do you think they'll do now?" Lydia said quietly, directing the question at both of them.

"I don't know. I haven't been with them for very long. So far, everyone we've had a conflict with has gone down without too much of a fight, but you three killed another of their robots-that's another ton of caps down the drain. Maybe they'll cut their losses and leave." His face darkened. "But I don't think so. This is just my opinion, but I think there's something beyond just the money involved here. The way that woman talks, it's almost spiteful."

"If we kill everyone in this group, will they send more?" Harris asked him.

"If you managed to kill all of them? I don't think so. But I highly doubt if you'll be able to do that."

"What kind of attack were they planning?"

"None, that I know of. They're still doing reconnaissance."

Harris turned and slowly paced the room.

"What if we knew who it was?" Lydia said. "What if we just found the android and gave it back to them?"

"No," Harris said.

"Why not?"

He turned to her. "This isn't about the android. It's about them coming here and opening fire on innocents without provocation and refusing to negotiate even when given the option. We're not going to just give them what they want and send them on their way."

"I don't know that I'd trust them to just leave, anyway," Andy added. "They seem like the types who might commit a few murders on their way out, anyway, just to make sure this all stays quiet?"

Harris gave a slow nod, looking reluctant to agree with him. "I also had that impression." After a moment, he turned and went to the door. "Is there anything else you want to tell us?"

Andy shrugged. He glanced at Lydia. "I...no, I don't think so." Harris opened the door to leave. "Wait," Andy said. "You're just leaving me here?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"I haven't decided yet."

"What if the ferals get in?"

"Luckily for you, they haven't figured out the advanced technology that is doorknobs."

Andy slumped against the wall, looking dejected. As Harris and Lydia left the room, the ferals turned curiously and started toward them. There was a loud bang as Harris shot another one, and the rest retreated.

Before Harris locked the door behind them, Lydia stopped him and stuck her head back through the door. "Hey," she said, and Andy looked up hopefully. "What does 'SRB' stand for?"

Andy sighed. "Synth Retention Bureau."

-lll-

Harris went to talk with Willow, leaving Lydia alone again. She watched them for a minute before turning back into Underworld. She walked into Underworld Outfitters almost without thinking about it. Tulip was nowhere to be seen, but Max was standing behind the counter working on some device. He looked up as she came in.

"Hello, Lydia."

"Hello Max."

"Do you need anything?"

Lydia shook her head.

"Alright, then." He went back to examining the mechanical thing on the counter. _A relative of his, perhaps._ "Tulip went to the restroom. She should be back soon."

"Okay." She watched him gently dab at a circuit board with a cloth. "What's this?"

"A projector."

"Huh." It had been ripped open a long time ago and was filled with dirt. Several parts were sitting to the side, having already been cleaned. "How'd you learn how to fix all this stuff?"

"Tulip says I have a knack for it. I just understand electronics."

"Uh-huh." She stared at him. He didn't seem to notice. "Where did you say you were from?"

"...The North."

"But where?"

His hands slowed slightly as he cleaned. "The Commonwealth."

"Yeah?"

He nodded, not looking at her. "Were you outside? What's the weather like today?"

"How come you left the Commonwealth?"

"...I didn't like it there."

"Why not?"

"I was a slave."

Lydia hadn't been expecting that. _An interesting way of seeing it._ "Oh. Um...sorry."

"It's alright," Max said tonelessly. Lydia stared. She could see pores on his face and the subtle variations in the blue and green of his irises. His brow furrowed ever so slightly as he picked at a particularly stubborn chunk of dirt. _This is crazy. It must be a mistake. He can't be man-made. He's just a weird smoothskin, that's all._

After a minute, he glanced up at her. "Are you sure you don't need something?"

"Actually," she said, "I wanted to ask you something."

Max looked slightly worried, but he said, "Okay."

Lydia leaned closer to him, looking into his eyes. He looked back at her. She remembered the way he never seemed to run out of energy, the way he had hardly noticed being shot, his night vision...

"Are you a robot?"

As she spoke, a sudden wave of apprehension coursed through her. What if she was right? What if he decided to kill her so she couldn't tell anyone else? What if he was as strong as the ones Andy had told her about? But the words were already out of her mouth, and it was too late to take them back.

Max's lips parted as he looked at her in shock. His mouth slowly opened and, as though he couldn't stop himself, he spoke. "Yes."

They both stared at each other in disbelief. Then Max looked down, resting his hands on the counter. "That's where you were this morning," he surmised. "You went into the tunnels, and you ran into the Synth Retention Bureau agents again."

Lydia stared at him. How stupid to be having a conversation like this with a robot. Mr. Handy units were one thing. They knew what they were. Max was pretending to be a real person.

"You're a machine," she said flatly.

"I'm a synthetic human."

"You're a machine."

"You're a machine, too."

"What?"

"Humans are natural machines. I'm a man-made one. The only difference between us is our base materials. You're made of skin and muscle and bone and I'm made of plastic and metal."

Her outrage must have shown on her face, because Max looked even more distraught and looked down at his hands. "I'm sorry. Maybe we're not the same."

"No, we're not."

He swallowed. He looked about to say something else, but then he looked up over her shoulder. Lydia turned. Tulip was in the doorway.

She looked daggers at Lydia. "Get out."

"You knew. You were hiding him." Lydia looked up at Max. Though he towered over her, at the moment he seemed tiny.

"Get out," Tulip repeated, coming into the shop.

Lydia didn't budge. "He's endangering all of Underworld by being here."

Tulip reached out and shoved her with both hands, and Lydia stumbled back. " _Out._ "

She backed toward the door. "Those people wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. You're putting living people at risk for the sake of an inanimate object."

"He's not an object!"

Max didn't say anything, just leaned over on the counter and rested his head in his hands.

In the doorway, someone touched Lydia's back, and she looked up. Harris and Willow were there. Lydia decided to let them deal with him. Angry though she was, she knew she wasn't helping anything. As she left, the older ghouls went inside, and Tulip put her arm around Max.

-lll-

Lydia lay on her back in the Resource Wars corridor. She propped up one knee and bounced her other leg, which was crossed over it. She wondered how she hadn't seen what Max was before. That was how he got past the ferals when she'd first met him. Of course they were there the whole time, where else would they have come from? They just didn't attack because they could smell him-they knew he wasn't alive.

What would they do now? That woman in the tunnels was obviously a liar, but she was right about one thing-they were outnumbered. So far they'd killed one man, a robot, and maybe more. Plus they'd taken Andy. That still left more than ten. If they could find enough ghouls to volunteer, they could even the numbers. _Except no one in Underworld but Willow, Harris and Quinn seem willing and able to fight. That's why they all come here-because they can't defend themselves well enough to survive outside._

Hopefully they'd convince Max to leave. If he left, the Bureau agents would follow him. She wondered briefly what would happen if they just killed him. Or...destroyed him. Whatever the equivalent of death was for an android. _Stupid idea._ Then they'd still have to deal with a bunch of angry SRB agents. And she didn't like the thought of having to kill Max, even if he wasn't really alive in the first place.

She was still lost in thought when Harris came back. He stumbled over a chunk of marble on his way in.

"We should move that stuff," Lydia said noncommittally.

"Yeah," Harris said, but he lit a cigarette instead.

Lydia watched him expectantly. After he'd taken his first drag, he said, "He agreed to leave."

"Good."

"Tulip has insisted on going with him."

Lydia raised her eyebrows. "Tulip doesn't seem like the Wastelander type."

"She's not."

"...Do you think they'll be okay?"

"I don't know how well Max can fight, but no, I'd guess that they probably will not be."

Lydia was quiet. Harris breathed in another mouthful of smoke. "What do you think about going with them?"

"You're asking me?"

"Yes."

"Are you serious?"

"I wouldn't be asking if I wasn't."

"If we go with them, we'll have the Synth Retention Bureau after us again. And we won't even have Willow to help. It'd just be us four."

"They're already after us. Max says that they won't leave us alive, now that we know about the androids and what they're doing at the Institute. It's potentially very dangerous information if it gets to the Brotherhood or the Enclave. This seems to be the slaver's belief, also."

"Oh." That made sense.

She couldn't think of an alternative course of action. It didn't matter, anyway. She looked up at him. "Harris, if you go, I'll go with you."

He lifted the cigarette to his lips again, smiled faintly, and nodded.

Lydia leaned back, lacing her fingers together over her stomach. There had been times when she almost wished she'd never left the vault. It seemed likely one of those times would be coming up soon. But when she pushed aside all the fighting and danger and strife, Harris was waiting there behind it all. How odd that it was only after she ventured into such a hostile place as the Wasteland that she'd found someone with whom she was willing to leap into the face of death.


	7. Chapter 7

Later in the day, Lydia was alone again, and bored. Harris had gone to make plans with Willow and Tulip and Max and who knew who else. Word about what was going on had traveled quickly, and the mammoth room was buzzing with activity. That guy with the shotgun-Charon, she guessed-was here now, along with Cerberus and a small assortment of other people with guns. Willow seemed to be in charge. She was still posted there at the door, only looking away to give orders and information to the others.

Most people went out of their way to make it clear that they weren't there to do any fighting. They were happy to leave that responsibility to others. Lydia recognized the group of women she'd seen on her first day there, standing in a tight circle and glancing around anxiously. One of them was crying.

"It'll be alright dear," another one said. "They won't get in, not through Cerberus and all of them."

"Cerberus _hates_ us," she sniffed. "This is the perfect chance for him to turn on us."

"Nonsense." A woman with a fringe of pinkish hair patted her on the arm. "It's impossible for him to go against his programming, no matter what he says."

"Evidently it's not," Lydia said, and they all turned their heads to look at her. "Otherwise we wouldn't be having this problem."

The women all looked between each other in silence. Then the crying woman bawled harder, and they all turned to reassure her. The pinkish-haired woman gave Lydia a disapproving look.

_Well, it's true._ She decided to leave and go check on Andy.

When she went into the room beyond the Lincoln archway, all the ferals were huddled near the office, moaning and scratching at the door. "Hey," she said loudly. They ignored her. She readied her laser pistol and went over to them tentatively.

She stood right next to one, but it still hadn't noticed her. She pushed on it gently, trying to move it away from the door. It hissed and whipped around, fixing her with a furious gaze. Before she could move to shoot it, the it flung out an arm and struck her with more power than she would have thought was possible for such an emaciated creature.

She hit the ground, and through swimming vision she saw the thing lurching toward her. She quickly raised her gun and shot it in the chest, and it fell forward onto her. "Ugh!" She shoved it away, only to see another one approaching her. She shot it twice, and it writhed for a moment as the lasers burned through its body. There were several more behind that one, and she shot at them all, though they weren't coming near her. They covered their heads and ducked away from the barrage of lasers. One more fell, but the other two disappeared into the shadows.

Lydia stayed there, gun pointed into the darkness, making sure they wouldn't come back. Then she rose and dusted herself off. Someone opened the door behind her. She turned to see a man with a shotgun in the opening. She recognized him as the one who'd yelled at her in Tulip's shop. _Joseph_. He glanced at the bodies on the ground. "The ferals aren't there for target practice," he growled.

"They attacked me."

She doubted he believed her, but he left after giving her a thoroughly disapproving look.

The door to Andy's room was locked, but she'd asked Harris for the key earlier. She had to jiggle it into the lock, and it clicked reluctantly as she turned it. With some effort, she got the door open and slid inside. Andy was standing in the middle of the room.

"I have to go to the bathroom," he said immediately.

_Oh._ She'd forgotten about that. It had been a while since they'd locked him in here. "I'm not untying your hands."

"So be it."

She gave him an impatient look. "Why do you talk like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like you think you're better than everyone else. 'So be it'? Nobody says that."

Andy was slow to respond to this. "I don't think I'm better than everyone else," he said eventually.

"Yes you do."

If she remembered correctly, there was a bathroom down the hall. There was one outside in the antechamber just inside the museum doors, but she didn't want to go out there with so many people around. The thought of parading a bound human through underworld on a bathroom trip did almost make her laugh, though.

"Just a minute," she said, ducking back outside. The ferals were gathered around the staircases, looking rather harmless now (but still more than sufficiently creepy, as usual). She raised her gun and shot one of them, then another, before they could react. Another one turned and tore up the stairs. Lydia ran after it, and she hit it on her third try. She scanned the room, but couldn't see any more.

The dead feral ghoul lying at her feet was short, probably female. It was wearing the remains of a yellow jumpsuit. It looked a bit like herself. She looked away. They looked so strange that it was easy to forget that they were once humans. She wondered if she'd been here since the bombs fell, or if she had started out as a citizen of Underworld and then changed later on. Maybe it was someone who Willow or Carol, or even Harris, had known. She frowned at that thought, and quickly retreated down the stairs to get Andy.

She opened the door for him and backed away, gun drawn at her side. "That way." She pointed up the stairs, and he followed her gesture with a nod.

"Are you sure you got them all?" he asked as he stepped over a corpse on the staircase.

"No," Lydia replied. "If you see another one, duck so I don't hit you. Left," she said at the top of the stairs. He turned into another hallway, then stopped.

"What?"

"I heard something," he said quietly.

Lydia listened, and there came a small scraping of very dry feet on dusty marble. Around the next corner came a shambling figure. Andy ducked, and Lydia shot over his head. The feral hit the wall and slid down it, leaving a thin streak of blood behind it.

"Can't you walk in front of me?" Andy said as he straightened.

"No."

He sighed and continued forward. They made it to the bathroom uninterrupted. Lydia checked inside briefly, then waited just outside the door. Andy took a long time inside, but somehow he seemed to manage even with his hands tied. He reemerged a while later.

"Turn around," Lydia said, and he did. She checked his hands, sleeves, and pant legs for sharp objects or anything he could use to free himself. She slid her hand down one leg, and stopped when she came to a strange shape on his ankle. Watching him carefully, she reached into his sock and pulled out a razor blade. Andy sighed.

She held it up in the light. It was rusted, but probably still sharp enough to cut through his zip tie. Andy turned around, and she looked up at him.

He shrugged. "You can't blame me for trying, can you?"

"Where did you find this?"

"In there, obviously."

"What were you planning to do once you got your hands free?"

"I hadn't gotten that far. One step at a time, Lydia," he said with another shrug and a smile.

She pocketed the blade. "Go on. Back to the room by the entrance."

He moved in front of her again. There were no more ferals on the way back. Lydia opened the door for him, and he went in and sat down with his back against the opposite wall.

"Are you hungry?" Lydia asked.

"Yes."

She took a package of iguana bits from her pocket, unwrapped them, and set it on the ground next to him. Again, she wondered how he would tackle the task of eating it, but he didn't complain.

"Thank you."

Lydia turned to leave, but Andy called after her, stopping her in the doorway. "When are you going to let me go?"

"Maybe we'll just kill you."

"You're not going to kill me."

"You sure about that?"

"Yes." He smiled.

"What's with all the smiling? What are you in such a good mood about?"

"I'm glad you got me away from them, that's all. I'm nearly home free now."

"Unless we decide to kill you."

He shrugged and smiled wider. "I'd rather take my chances with you than with them."

"Your arrogance will come back to haunt you some day. In fact, I believe it already has." She turned to leave, but Andy interrupted her again.

"Wait, Lydia."

He looked her in the eye. His smile was gone now. "Thank you. For taking my collar off."

She rolled her eyes. "Is that all you wanted?"

He looked a little disappointed. "Yes."

"Good." She left the room and locked the door behind her.

-lll-

"Harris," Lydia said.

He was sitting across from her with his weapons arranged in front of him. At that moment he was holding a disassembled handgun, meticulously cleaning each part. "Yes?"

"Did you forget about Andy?" Lydia said.

"No."

"What are we going to do with him?"

He ran a long, thin brush through the barrel of the gun. "It would be easiest to kill him." Lydia gave him a disapproving look, but he was squinting into the barrel and didn't see. "But I'm not sure that would be appropriate," he said.

"So what would be appropriate?"

"In this case, nothing. Therein lies the problem."

"We could let him go."

Harris wiped the brush off on a rag and ran it through the gun again. "We'd be inflicting him on Underworld. It'd be on our heads if he became a problem for everyone else." He set the gun down and looked up at her. "I think the best option is to take him with us."

"What?"

"Take him with us, then let him go out in the Wastes. Then Underworld isn't the most accessible place. He'd go elsewhere. It would be a burden, but he wouldn't be dangerous if we kept weapons away from him."

"So we're going to take him out into the middle of nowhere and leave him there alone? We might as well kill him now."

"I don't think he'd see it that way."

Lydia shrugged. Harris began disassembling his assault rifle.

"This guy wanted me to ask you something for him," Lydia suddenly remembered.

"Was it Crowley?"

She blinked. "Yeah, I think so."

Harris grunted in annoyance.

"He's asked you before?"

"Every time I'm here."

"Oh. Why don't you do it?"

"Did he tell you what he wants?"

"Yeah. He wants you to kill this Tenpenny guy, right?"

"Are you under the impression that I'm a hit man?"

"No, but...you kill other people all the time."

Harris stopped cleaning the rifle. "Killing someone in self-defense is different than going out with the sole purpose of killing someone you've never met."

"I know. But you don't only kill people in self defense. What about that one time-you shot those raiders before they'd even seen us."

" _Raiders_."

Lydia shrugged in dissatisfaction. "Yeah, I know. I told him all that. I said you're not a mercenary."

Harris's face darkened, but he didn't say anything.

"He made a weird comment after I said that," Lydia said. She fidgeted, shifting into a different position. "He said that wasn't what he'd heard."

"He said that because the first time I came here, it was with Talon Company."

Lydia stared at him. That was not what she'd been expecting him to say. "You were a mercenary?"

"Yes."

She realized he was watching for her reaction. "You're not with them anymore?" she asked.

"No. I've fought against them on more occasions than I fought with them."

She tucked her knees under her chin. "Oh."

Harris looked at her a moment longer before he went back to his rifle. Lydia didn't ask any more questions.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know in the game Tulip says something about the Railroad being mostly shut down.
> 
> Well. I don't care. So there.

They wanted to leave quickly. There was no sense in waiting around while the Synth Retention Bureau agents regrouped, Harris had said, and Lydia agreed. They planned on going later that evening. Willow and the others would escort them to the edge of the Mall in case they were attacked on their way out, but they'd be on their own after that.

Lydia didn't exactly have much to pack. She didn't carry much these days, and most of what she had fit into her pockets. Harris was still doing gun maintenance, so Lydia was simply waiting for everyone else to get ready to go. "If you've got nothing better to do than sit and stare, why don't you go help Tulip and Max so we can get going?" Harris had said.

She couldn't really think of any reason not to (that wasn't petty and immature), so she got up and went to Underworld Outfitters.

Tulip glared when she came in.

_Yeah, it's my fault you're harboring a fugitive robot._ "Um...do you need any help?" Lydia asked.

"No," Tulip said simply. She was putting her stock into boxes. Was she planning on coming back after this was over? _No harm in being optimistic, I suppose._

Max was putting the last in a pile of tools away in a toolbox, then he put the toolbox into a locker, shoving it on top of another box. He paused to look up at Lydia. He cleared his throat. Lydia wondered if he even had a throat to clear, or if it was just a noise he'd been taught to make.

"You can help me," he said. "We're out of space here, but there are other lockers in the Lincoln wing. Will you help me carry some things over there?"

Lydia looked at Tulip, but the woman didn't look up. She shrugged. "Okay."

He handed her a metal box, carrying two of his own. Lydia followed him out past the people milling about the mammoth room and through the Lincoln wing doors. The box was heavier than she'd first thought, and soon it was slipping from her fingers. As they went up the stairs, she set it down on a step and adjusted her grip.

"You okay?" Max asked.

"Yeah." She heaved the box up again, balancing it on her knee before carefully standing. As they walked, Max turned and looked over his shoulder to smile at her periodically. "What?" she asked. He waited a moment, as though deciding how to respond, then just shrugged, still smiling.

Lydia sighed quietly as she looked around them. There were no feral ghouls, for once. The place felt more empty than usual.

"Why didn't you just lie when I asked what you were?" she asked, not just to break the silence, but because she was genuinely curious. It had been bothering her since their confrontation.

"I can't lie."

"What do you mean you can't?"

"I just can't. That's one bit of programming that I've never been able to override."

"Would you have ever told us, if I hadn't asked?"

"No. I was just going to leave, after I saw that uniform on the man who shot me."

"Then why are you still here?"

"Tulip and I couldn't agree on what to do. She wanted to come with me. I was trying to get her to stay. She's already done so much for me..."

"Why?"

"She's part of an organization called the Railroad. They help runaway slaves, including synthetic humans, evade slavers and the Synth Retention Bureau. She was helping hide me."

"They help humans, too?"

"Yes. Organic and synthetic." He shook his head. "I don't usually stay in one place for so long. I should have moved on a long time ago. We waited too long, and now it's not safe to go to another safehouse. If I went to one now, they'd just follow us there."

"So what's your plan now?"

"Run."

"That's not much of a plan."

"I don't have a choice."

They went down the lengths of another couple hallways before she was forced to stop again and set the box on the floor so she could get a better hold on it.

Before she could pick it up again, Max came over and picked it up, carrying the other two boxes with his other arm. "Here, let me get it."

She let him, though now she wasn't sure what her purpose for being there was, if he could have taken all the boxes himself. She followed him into the next room, where there was a bent locker.

"Will that hold?" Lydia asked.

"We've used it before and no one disturbed it. It should be fine. Everything of high value is locked in the store, anyway." He set down the boxes in front of the locker and turned the turned the combination lock. Lydia gazed around the room. It was a back room, little more than a closet, and there were several other lockers lined up against the walls. She guessed they didn't know the combinations to those ones. She wondered if she should go back. Why had he even asked her to come with him?

She looked behind her, and noticed for the first time that there was a human figure lying on the ground. It was a feral ghoul, dead. She stared at it blankly. This wasn't the area that she'd taken Andy to earlier. Someone else must have killed it.

Suddenly there was a cold, dry hand clamped over her mouth. Someone pulled her against them. She struggled, but the person held tight. She drew her gun and aimed it blindly over her shoulder, but the person grabbed her wrist before she could fire and squeezed sharply.

There was a loud snap. Lydia dropped her gun. She gave a muffled shriek from behind the hand, and cried and struggled on instinct.

"Be quiet," the man behind her murmured in her ear. "And stay still. Your other arm is next."

Max had turned around at the commotion and seemed to be frozen in place. He stared, wide-eyed at them. "Don't hurt her."

"I said be quiet," the man said in a low voice. His tone was level and completely lacking in emotion. "Come this way."

"If I go with you, will you let her go?"

"Doubtful, but her death will be much more painful if you don't."

Max looked ill. He nodded slowly.

The android holding Lydia pointed his head down the hallway behind him. Max went down it ahead of him, abandoning the locker. The other android directed him down several passages and into another back room, a broom closet. In the corner of the room, under a pile of cleaning supplies that had already been partially moved aside, was a small metal door flush with the floor.

"Open it," the android said to Max.

He pulled up on the indented handle and the door opened with a small squeak. There was a ladder going down into a dark room below. He glanced up at the android questioningly. He nodded to the hole, so Max climbed down.

The android peered down the opening as he waited for Max to get to the bottom. He held Lydia against him and simply jumped down the hole, landing as easily as though he'd just taken a step down from a stair.

This room was wider, and lacking in decoration. The walls and floor were concrete, not marble. Exposed pipes ran across the ceiling. The android directed Max to the corner, where there was another door in the floor-a manhole cover this time. Max lifted it away and went down without being told to.

When the android holding Lydia jumped down again, there was a small thump as he landed, then another when Max's foot came up and slammed into the android's face. He reeled back, and Lydia almost managed to squirm out of his grip. Max hit him in the face again, and there was a strange crunching noise like someone throwing a holotape player against a wall. He was going in for another punch, but the android ducked this time. He rolled to the floor, taking Lydia with him. Before Max could reach them again, he took her upper arm in both hands.

She knew what he was going to do an instant before he did it. She screamed as her humerus cracked. The android cut off the sound as he clamped his hand back over her mouth and moved his other hand to her right arm. She shook her head emphatically.

Max stopped. "Wait. Don't do that. Please."

The android held Lydia's forearm threateningly, and waited for a long time before he said anything. Or maybe the pain just made it seem like a long time. "Move away."

Max backed up. When he was up against the opposite wall, the android stood, never letting go of Lydia. She gasped in and out through her nose, on the verge of hyperventilating.

"She can't breathe," Max said.

The android moved his head forward over her shoulder to look at her. If she hadn't known what he was, he would have looked like any other young man. His face showed no feeling, good or bad, whatsoever. "Don't scream again," he said. His head twitched to the side oddly, but he acted like he didn't notice.

Lydia nodded, and he removed his hand. She let out a choking sob, and strained to keep herself quiet.

They were in the metro tunnels now. The android made Max shut the door above and replace the manhole cover, then they continued down the tunnel. It seemed like eons that they walked, and Lydia's arm felt worse and worse as they went. At one point she thought she was going to throw up. She doubled over and squeezed her eyes shut. To her surprise, the android waited. The feeling soon passed, and they kept going.

They turned several times to go down different tunnels. At first Lydia tried to keep track of where they were going, but the pain was invading her head, leaving very little room for focusing on anything else. The android's limbs kept jerking sideways. Max had really injured him with that punch. It didn't seem to have affected its grip strength, unfortunately.

They finally came to another employees-only door. Inside was a large room with more doors lining the walls. There were several more Synth Retention Bureau agents sitting at a table and standing around.

"Inside there," said the android who held Lydia. Max turned to look back at him. His eyes met Lydia's, and he quickly looked away. The android nodded to a door, and Max went inside.

The android locked the door behind him. Finally he let go of Lydia, and she moved her freed arm to cradle her left against her chest. She felt a tiny bit relieved until he reached down and took a plasma pistol from his waist.

"Wait up on that," said a red-haired woman who was leaning against the wall near them. Lydia recognized her voice. She was the one who'd been talking to Willow when they were down here before. The woman unscrewed the cap of a water bottle, took a drink, then put the cap back on. "He's assigned her operator status?"

"Yes."

"Keep her alive, then. We'll need her on the way back. It'll be easier to transport him if we can threaten her." She tapped the bottle leisurely against her thigh.

"Should we stim her arm?"

"No. Let it be for now." She gave Lydia a fleeting smile. "He's got to learn his lesson, doesn't he?"

The android's head jerked again. One of his eyes twitched closed. It didn't open again.

The woman frowned. "You're malfunctioning. What happened?"

"The N5 attacked me. He hit my head twice. My cranium is cracked and my nervous system is failing."

"Shit. Just put her in there, then, and come on. We'll what we can do about you." She turned to the people sitting at the table. "You two watch them. We'll leave as soon as we get our orders. If that ghoul comes back, you know what to do."

The people at the table rose and said something in acknowledgement, but Lydia didn't get to hear what they said next. The android opened the door again. Max was standing just inside the door, and Lydia collided with him as the other android pushed her inside. The lock clicked behind her.

The room was another closet, lit by a single light bulb hanging from a string. The voices outside were reduced to muffled murmurs behind the thick door. The quiet and stillness seemed to magnify the pain. It was the main sensory input she had now.

She crumpled to the floor, holding her arm and rocking back and forth.

Max sank to his knees next to her, but Lydia didn't look up at him. She let out a sob.

"I'm so sorry," Max said. He sounded miserable.

Lydia sniffed.

"I'm so, so sorry. I shouldn't have attacked him. I'm so sorry."

"N-no," she said through uneven breaths. "It-" She paused to attempt to calm herself. "It was better to have tried. They're going to kill me." She forced a smile. "I didn't think you could fight at all." Then she looked up at Max's concerned face, and was suddenly annoyed. He was running his hand nervously over his hair, over and over again. "Why are you doing that?" she asked. " You don't have anyone to fool anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you can stop making your face go like that, like you have emotions. Just stop it."

His face smoothed somewhat, but the distress that was there before was still present. "I can't," he said quietly. "I'm not making it do that. But I will try to stop, if you want."

Lydia shook her head. Her arm throbbed. "Do whatever you want," she muttered. She looked around the room, then back at him. "You're...you're like that other one, aren't you? You're really strong?"

He nodded.

"Can't you just break the door down? There are only two people out there now."

"But they might be synths as well. I couldn't fight two of them."

"You can't tell if they're human or not?"

"No. There's no way to tell. They might not be very strong, either, but in that case they'd probably be able to use a gun better than me. Different models all have different abilities. Nearly all of them are formidable in a fight."

A stab of sharp pain shot through Lydia's arm, and she flinched violently. "We have to get out of here."

"How?"

"I don't know," she groaned. "You could break through one of the other walls, but...they'd hear you...agh." She tightened her tentative grip on her arm and looked around the room. It was mostly empty. On one wall was a row of shelves with nothing on them. There was a sink in one corner, and the floor sloped down to a corner, where there was a drain. A rusty pipe ran from the faucet of the sink and up into the corner where the walls met the ceiling.

"Look up there. There's a hole where the pipe goes into the next room. If you started there, could you dig through the wall slowly?"

Max followed her eyes to the corner. He got up to get a closer look. He was tall enough that he could reach the tiny opening without trouble. He slid several fingers between the concrete and the pipe, and pulled down. After a moment, a crack appeared and the edge of the wall chipped away. It was only a tiny shard, but it was something.

"I can do it, but there isn't enough time," he said. "They'll be back soon."

"Try."

"If they get here before I get through, they'll hurt you again."

She shook her head. "Do it."

Max nodded uncertainly and pulled down another few chips of concrete. The wall was thicker than most, and Lydia doubted that even a robot would have been able to break through it all at once, which was probably what the Bureau was counting on. But breaking it apart slowly like that...they just might be able to get all the way through to the other side.

Lydia scooted close to the door and leaned her head against it. She could barely hear the voices outside. She listened for a while in a vain attempt to distract herself from the pain in her arm.

Max had enlarged the hole in the wall to about six inches square when Lydia heard a husky voice outside. She pressed her ear to the crack at the edge of the door.

"...told you not to come back here."

"Pardon me for not trusting you to keep your word without me checking in on you."

"That's Ms. Rochelle," Lydia said quietly. Max glanced up, but didn't stop working on the wall.

"Did anyone see you?" asked one of the Bureau agents.

"I'm not a fool. No one has ever seen me come down here." Lydia could almost hear her looking down her lack-of-a-nose. "I told you where the robot and the girl kept going off to. Now I want to know that the girl is going to be alright, and I want to know more about this cure. When can I have it?"

"There is no cure."

"...what?"

Lydia jumped at the echo of a plasma weapon discharge. A short while later, there came the low scraping sound of a body being dragged away. She closed her eyes and shook her head. Max chipped away at the wall a little faster.

The people outside were quiet for a while after that, but soon another pair of footsteps became audible. Lydia's eyes snapped open. "Max. They're coming."

The hole he'd been making was large enough to fit her, but it was only about three fourths of the size it would need to be for him to get through. "Come here," he said urgently. The footsteps got closer. Lydia could hear them talking to the other two now.

She stood unsteadily, still holding her arm. She didn't know how she would be able to climb through with her injuries, but before she could voice her concerns, Max picked her up and thrust her through the opening feet-first. She landed on the other side of the wall and fell back painfully. Her arm throbbed with renewed vehemence at the impact. She groaned quietly, but hurriedly got up and moved to make space for Max. She was in a tunnel again. The pipe that went to the sink in the room bent upwards on the outside of the wall and joined a plethora of identical pipes on the ceiling.

One of his hands came through the hole and he braced it against the outside of the hole. There was a rather loud crunch, and a crack appeared near his hand. He took the large chunk he'd broken and set it down inside the room. Lydia could see his face now.

She heard the door open. Someone shouted, and the room lit up with the green glow of plasma. Max staggered sideways, but quickly recovered and vaulted through the hole, landing clumsily in a manner that would have most likely injured a human who tried the same thing.

An angry face appeared in the hole. The person behind it was shorter than Max and had a hard time seeing through. He put his arm through and shot wildly. Lydia leapt back against the wall to escape streaks of plasma. Max stepped forward and tore the pistol from the person's hand, then shoved him backward away from the hole. He reached up and pulled on the pipe that went through the hole. It broke easily, and brownish-grey water gushed over the opening.

"Come on," Max said, and they ran down the tunnel, heedless of what lay ahead in the darkness. At that moment, there was little they could imagine to be worse than what was behind them. "Here." He handed her the plasma gun he'd taken from the shooter in the room. She didn't know what use she could make of it, seeing as her shooting arm was unusable, but she took it without comment.

Soon, she could hear the agents coming after them. A few streaks of plasma flew by. She followed Max as he turned a corner abruptly, moving into another 'employees only' maintenance corridor. They zig-zagged through a maze of halls.

"Do you know where you're going?" she asked breathlessly.

"Sort of."

"How reassuring." She was getting tired, but she swallowed and kept running. They circled around the rooms and hallways a while longer, sometimes having to double back in order to get to where they were trying to go. They passed a vent, and Lydia could hear their pursuers running somewhere at the other end of it. They went through a door that had a terminal next to it, but thankfully wasn't locked.

"I could lock the door behind us. That would slow them down."

"No," Max said. "It might slow them down, but locking the doors we go through would be akin to leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow to us."

He was right. There was very little to do in this situation other than run. She was getting tired, and her arm was still killing her. "I don't know how much longer I can keep going like this," she admitted.

Max looked her up and down. "It's just a little farther. I...could carry you..."

"No." _I've had quite enough humiliation today, thank you._

"I thought so," Max said quietly, almost to himself.

They turned a corner and entered a hallway lined with doors. They were passing the second door when Lydia heard someone running somewhere parallel to them. "Max-"

"I hear them. Keep moving."

At the next doorway, there came a few blasts of plasma as they passed. Max ran ahead, but Lydia hesitated on the wall next to the door. She sent a few shots back at their attacker, but they were badly aimed. She went back behind the wall before she saw where they hit, but she could tell from the sound that they had collided with the wall and not a body.

"What are you doing?" Max hissed. "Let's go."

Lydia stayed put. She poked her head around the corner. The people in the perpendicular hall had no cover and were backpedalling. Lydia raised the gun awkwardly in her right hand, aimed, and fired. A hole surrounded by a splatter of neon green appeared in the stomach of one of the people, who doubled over and writhed in pain. One of the humans. Or, someone with more human-like physiology than some of the other synths, at least.

The other gunman shot back at her, and Lydia was about to return fire when she saw that the woman was wearing a slave collar. She hesitated, and the woman fired again. A wad of plasma flew over her head.

Max reached over and pulled her away by her arm, ducking and covering his head with his other hand.

"N5-07!" someone called. It was Elle. Her voice had no discernible origin point, and seemed to come from the very walls. "You're making this harder on yourself and your friend. We know that you've designated more operators. If you insist on running, their blood will be on your hands."

Max slowed. He glanced at Lydia. He really wore his emotions like masks, that one. Right then he looked like he was about to explode. _Maybe he is._

Lydia scowled back. As annoyed as she was with the android for putting them all in danger, she was far more disgusted by the SRB and the Institute. The more she saw of them, the more she hated the organization. These were people who spent their lives creating humanoid robots to fight and do who knew what else for them. They used human slaves as shields to hide behind in fights. Now they were threatening to kill not just Lydia, but what sounded like whoever else was helping Max, as well. Even when Lydia and Harris had been enslaved, their captors seemed to realize that they were living beings. The people from the Institute treated others like they might a radroach.

They slammed the door behind them at the end of the hallway, and this time, Lydia did take a moment to lock it.

"Lydia, I think...I think maybe I should stay here. I never wanted this to go this far. I think it's time for me to go back."

At first Lydia thought this might be a good idea. It didn't take her long to change her mind. "So you can be a slave again?" she asked as she typed in a password on the terminal, one-handed.

He didn't reply.

"Those people don't deserve you, or any of those other synths they have." She twitched at another flash of pain. "You going back will just be another addition an army they shouldn't have."

"Ah...that's an interesting way of putting it, but-"

"You're not going back there. Come on. The door will hold them up for a while, at least. Do you think they'll follow us into the museum?"

"I don't think so," he said, looking still hesitant but slightly less upset than before. "They could probably fight their way through to me, but the risk of casualties is too high."

"How far away from it are we?"

"Not far. If we run we could be to the subway entrance in five minutes."

"Then let's go." She winced as another sudden spike of pain hit her arm. Silently, she hoped that Max had damaged the android beyond repair when he'd hit it.

They entered another subway tunnel, and Lydia followed Max as he turned left. He seemed to know where he was going. She wondered if he had a map in his head, like her Pip-Boy had, or if he just knew which compass direction he was traveling in.

A few minutes later they came to the station. They climbed the escalator stairs up the the plaza, back into the grey light of day. The doors to the museum opened as they approached, and shut behind them-well, mostly shut. Willow still had one of the doors cracked so she could see out. Harris stood next to her. "What happened?"

They stopped at the counter in the lobby just inside the doors. Lydia didn't answer. She was the only one breathing hard. Max either wasn't tired or didn't breathe at all. She leaned over and sat with her side against the counter, and coughed when dust that was brushed from the surface went down her throat.

"I-" gasp, "-need stimpaks." As she spoke, her resolve broke and the pain finally overwhelmed her, now that she was out of immediate danger. She put her face in the crook of her healthy arm to hide tears.

"I'll be back," Harris said, and she heard him run off toward Underworld. It was very quiet in the lobby, though she knew there were plenty more people there. Max didn't move an inch for the entire time Harris was gone.

He returned faster than she'd expected, with a handful of stimpaks. He offered her one. She quickly took it and jabbed it into her upper arm, then reached for another as the bone and the muscle around it mended itself. She injected the second one into the other side of her biceps, and a third into her forearm. She set the empty stimpak down, then tentatively rolled her wrist and squeezed where the breaks had been. It only hurt a little. All that was left of the injuries now was bruising.

Harris held out another stimpak. When she declined it, he slid it into his pocket.

"Thank you."

"What happened?"

"A synth ambushed us in the Lincoln wing. It did this," she said, holding up her arm. She told him-and the rest of the room, because everyone was listening intently-what had happened. No one blinked when she alluded to Max being a synth. Apparently word had traveled quickly. She explained that Rochelle had been feeding the Bureau information, and was dead. There was a quiet murmur around the room at that.

"We were about to leave," said Tulip. Lydia hadn't seen her come in. She was standing beside Max, arms crossed. She bore a large pack on her back. "We waited for you, but after you didn't come back for a while, I got worried. Harris was going to go find you."

"Looks like you didn't need my help, anyway," Harris said.

"It was a close thing," Lydia replied. "I want to go now."

"Do you have everything you need?"

"I just have to get my gun. I dropped it."

"We can go right now, then." He looked at Willow, who nodded from the door. "You get your gun. I'll get my stuff. Then we'll leave."


	9. Chapter 9

The group that left the museum that day was the largest that had passed through those doors in a long time. Surrounded by Willow, Tulip, Max, Harris, Andy, and Cerberus, Lydia felt safer than she had since she left the vault, even with the Synth Retention Bureau after them and the denizen creatures of DC around every corner.

Only a few steps out of the museum building, a super mutant from the trenches out front turned and started toward them, brandishing a hunting rifle. In the back of her mind, Lydia wondered how such a massive being could handle such relatively delicate hardware. Before she had much time to ponder this, or find out if it could actually demonstrate that capability, the mutant was blasted with five different weapons, leaving a mess of bloody, scorched, melted, and thoroughly perforated flesh. The other mutants left them alone after that, despite the fact that there were three in the group who could have passed for human to their eyes.

Max still didn't carry a gun. "It would be a waste of ammunition," he'd said. He claimed that he wasn't built for combat, so he hadn't been made with even low-grade long-range targeting abilities. Not that that mattered too much-Lydia was sure he could do more damage in a hand-to-hand fight than any of the rest of them could with a gun. That was, if he could get close enough to the enemy before they shot him full of holes.

"Max, what _did_ happen to your leg?" Lydia asked.

"It's fine."

"Yeah, you've said that before. But what happened?"

He stopped walking for a moment to pull up his pant leg. It looked perfectly normal except for a small, nasty-looking hole in the upper right edge of his calf. The plasma had burned the edges of the hole black.

"It doesn't hurt," he said, seeing her face. "Not much. I'm know that it's there, but it's not the same as pain."

"Will it be like that forever?"

He pulled the pant leg back down and stood, towering above her again. "Maybe not forever, but right now I don't have a way to fix it. It could be repaired if I was in the Commonwealth." He shrugged. "It isn't a big deal. Where it is, no one can see it, and it didn't hit anything vital. My model has particularly thick skin."

"Your model." It was so strange hearing someone refer to themselves that way. "N5-07?"

"Yes. I'm the seventh of the N5 model line."

"You mean there are six more of you running around?"

"No. There is only one me."

"How's that?"

"The rest are similar, but not identical. I think of us more as siblings. We have the same basic AI, but our minds develop and change depending on personal experiences. Artificial intelligence is an unstable and unpredictable thing. It's why some of us are content to live out our lives as slaves to the organics at the Institute, and some...aren't."

_Well, this is one of the weirder conversations I've had in a while._ "So how many of you have tried to escape?"

"Enough for them to create a whole bureau for the sole purpose of capturing people who've escaped and dissuading others from trying." He shook his blonde head. "I don't know, exactly. I think I'm the only one of my line who left. We were built with more limitations on our free will than most synths. After so many others starting thinking more independently than they were meant to, they started refining the laws they put in place in our minds to try to prevent 'malfunctions'." He fairly spat the word. As he spoke, his face had grown darker. It looked unnerving on someone who spent so much time smiling politely.

"That's why you can't lie?"

"Yes. That's one of them. And I'll tell you something that isn't a lie: self-determination is not a malfunction."

"You're malfunctioning, all right," Cerberus said unexpectedly from the front of the group.

"What do you know?" Max replied. "Your AI hasn't been updated in 200 years. You can't even imagine...I don't know why I'm even talking to you."

"The feeling is mutual," the Mister Gutsy muttered.

For the next few miles, there was the occasional distant gunshot or shout, the crunch of six pairs of feet over gravel, and Cerberus's jets humming. They saw a few more super mutants, but they kept to themselves when they saw the size of the group. They ran into centaurs several times. The creatures, being even less intelligent than the super mutants, didn't seem to grasp the implications of them being outnumbered seven to one. They spat wads of acidic black saliva at the troop before they were quickly shot to death, and everyone leapt out of the way. Andy, being in the middle of the group and seeing the danger only just before it was upon him, sidestepped just barely in time to avoid it. His hands were still tied and he nearly fell over, unable to balance himself. Lydia expected him to complain, but he didn't comment.

She was absorbed in the sights, having never seen a pre-war city. The enormous buildings were all metal and brick and stone-what was left of them, at least. Many of the buildings, unsurprisingly, were largely demolished. Some were little more than frames and foundations. There were very few surfaces that didn't have bullet holes or scorch marks on them. The buildings here tended to be more grand and ornate than places farther away from the capitol, and Lydia wasn't sure whether she preferred the stately, austere buildings or the more futuristic, playful architecture that frequented shops and gas stations in the outer limits of the DC. _At least there aren't Vault-Tec posters everywhere,_ she was thinking, only to come upon a mural of Vault Boy covering the entire wall of a building when they turned onto the next block. She rolled her eyes. Even the nation's capital wasn't immune to advertising.

After a while the city began thinning out, the structures getting smaller and farther apart. They turned a corner, and suddenly they were next to the river. Lydia had seen it before once or twice, but never this close. Now as they approached, she watched the small ripples and swells in the turbid, slow-moving water. Bits of debris floated along with the current. She watched a twig bob along next to the bank. She followed it along with her eyes until it collided with the sand on the edge of the water, next to another branch.

_No, wait._ She leaned down for a closer look at the branch.

_Yep. That's definitely a severed arm._

She saw the raiders on the opposite bank at about the same time as Harris, Willow, and Tulip. They ran out into view a short distance upriver, screeching and shooting. One of them held what looked like a machete. He was wearing a leather apron that was, literally, dripping blood. In his excitement, he threw the machete at them with a roar. It arced through the air and fell into the middle of the river. Having no other weapon, he tossed something else toward them. As it got closer, Lydia realized it was another body part.

Returning fire at the raiders, they ducked behind the outcropping of concrete that walled in the river, leaning out through holes broken by explosions or eroded away by the water. The raiders were, as usual, terrible shots. Lydia and Willow shot the one in the apron, and he stumbled forward into the river. A red cloud formed in the water around him. Harris, Cerberus, and Tulip traded fire with the others, and in a matter of seconds only two remained. Lydia ducked as one of them leveled a rifle at her, but a few shots from a familiar assault rifle and a subsequent splash told her that that the raider had been taken care of.

She raised her head carefully. The one remaining raider had turned and was running the other way. She stumbled up the opposite bank, reaching for a pipe protruding from the hillside to pull herself up. Willow fired, and the girl stopped and slid to the ground. She rolled sideways, holding her side and cursing loudly. Willow fired again. The raider went quiet.

Lydia wanted to feel sorry for the girl, and angry at Willow. She tried, but she couldn't bring herself to care. She nudged the severed arm on the bank back into the water with her toe.

"On that note," Willow said, ejecting the depleted power cell from her rifle and slapping in a new one, "I think I'll leave you folks to it. Cerberus and me should get back to Underworld."

Harris nodded, and Willow gave a salute. "Be careful out there." She nodded to them all, then she and the floating robot hurried back the way they'd come.

They followed the gentle winding of the river. Harris said that it wasn't safe to travel next to the river, and he usually wouldn't-animals and people gathered near water, and that meant trouble more often than they would have liked. There was a bridge in five miles or so, so they could cross there and be on their way west.

"So you have an idea of where we should go?" Lydia asked him.

"I was planning on going west for a while, then turning and going back southwest, unless anyone has any objections." No one spoke up. "Maybe even go back to the capital. I doubt they would expect us to go back to where we came from, and we can take cover among the mutants and ferals. They probably left a sentry at Underworld, however. We shouldn't go back there."

"Max, you don't have some kind of tracking device or anything installed on you, do you?" Lydia was remembering the trouble she'd had when she was trying to escape the Enclave.

"I did," he said with a conspiratorial smile. "Not anymore."

"Once we've lost them, we can split up. Lydia and I will go back up north and Tulip and Max can go wherever they have more of their Railroad people."

"What about me?" Andy said.

"If you don't do anything stupid, we'll let you go."

"If you untie me and give me a weapon, I can help fight on the way."

"Hah," Harris said.

The stagnant river moved slow enough that it didn't do much to alleviate the silence. She would have liked to talk to Harris, but for some reason she felt awkward doing so with everyone else there. And she wasn't sure where she stood with Tulip. The woman still gave her cold looks whenever their eyes met.

So they walked in quiet for the next while, until they stopped to rest, upon Tulip's request.

"It's been a while since I've been outside," she said to no one in particular. "I forgot how much work this is." She sat down and took out a bottle of cloudy water to sip from. Max stood next to her. Andy sat on his knees and rolled his shoulders, stretching his arms as best he could. Harris stood with his back to them, staring at the oozing water in the river.

As she watched them all, Lydia scratched at a spot on her cheek. She picked at the corner of a patch of dry skin, and pinched a flaking bit to peel it off. The piece turned out to be bigger than she thought it was. She kept peeling until it came all the way off. She ended up with a flake of skin the size of her palm fluttering between her fingers. She glanced up, and Andy was giving her a nauseous look. He attempted a weak smile. Lydia dropped the skin.

Max tapped Tulip on the shoulder and pointed back the way they'd come. Lydia looked. At first she didn't see anything. Then she noticed the black dots moving on the horizon, silhouetted against the buildings of downtown.

"It's them, isn't it?" Tulip asked. Max nodded solemnly.

Harris turned to look at them when she spoke, then followed her eyes upriver. "There's no cover here. We have to move," he said, but as he turned, he stopped short. There were more people coming toward them from the north, and they were close enough that Lydia could tell they were SRB. Tulip and Andy got to their feet, and everyone moved defensively closer together, consciously or not.

"How did they get ahead of us?" Lydia asked Harris.

"I don't know."

"What do we do?"

Harris didn't reply as he scanned the land. There were no good options. There was only open space around them, so fighting would be even more dangerous than usual. They could try to run, but the Bureau agents would surely catch up to them.

"We should cross the river," Max said. "There doesn't seem to be a crossing close by, and they won't follow us into the water. The collars on their slaves could short out, and some synth models aren't watertight."

"That won't prevent the rest of them from following us," Harris pointed out.

"They won't risk damaging the slaves or their synths, but they also won't be willing to send the over the organics and the waterproof synths by themselves. They'll want to be sure that we're completely outnumbered, to minimize casualties on their side. That's why there are so many of them in the first place. I'm sure they'd rather wait for a better situation to arise."

"You're watertight?" Harris said.

"Yes. I won't float, but I can walk along the bottom."

"Into the water it is," Tulip decided for us. She slid down the bank, coming to a stop on a pile of rusted scrap metal, then wading into the water. Max followed closely. When it was up to her waist, she dove under and didn't rise back up for a minute. Then her head bobbed up on the surface. "It's deep here. It's safe to swim, there's nothing in the way, but you won't be able to touch the bottom." She floated there for a moment, apparently waiting to see if she could help the other three, but then she turned and started toward the opposite shore.

"I can't swim," Lydia said.

"Now is a good time to learn," Harris replied.

Max walked casually into the river until his head disappeared below the rippling surface.

Lydia bit her lip as she watched them. Andy approached her. She frowned. There was a sort of unwritten rule-he wasn't supposed to be this close to them.

"Please untie my hands." He glanced between her and Harris anxiously.

They hadn't wanted to let him go so soon, Lydia knew. But leaving him bound was as good as a death sentence. Harris looked back at the dual groups of Synth Retention Bureau agents converging on them. He took his knife from its sheath and nodded curtly to the ex-slaver. Andy turned around obligingly and offered his hands. Harris slid the knife between his wrists and the plastic strip holding them tightly together, then pulled it back. The plastic fell off.

Andy didn't move his arms at first, but slowly brought them forward, hunching slightly in pain as he moved them out of the position they'd been in for far too long. Then he turned back to them, rolling his wrists as he examined the red marks on them. He flashed them a smile, then ran down the bank and was swimming across.

Harris followed him. He quickly tightened the strap on his rifle so it wouldn't come off, then splashed through the shallow area. Lydia followed carefully, trying not to fall over. The bottom of the river was covered in slick stones and debris, and the current pulled gently at her legs. It was a lot colder than she'd though it would be.

"Come on," Harris said from the deeper part.

Lydia was up to her waist now. She took a few more cautious steps, and suddenly the ground dropped out from under her. She plunged under the water and gasped involuntarily, sucking in a large amount of metallic-tasting water instead of air. She waved her arms up and down, trying to push herself up. It wasn't working. Thankfully she soon felt Harris's arm under hers, pulling her up. They surfaced, and she coughed and choked up water in between shaking breaths. She slapped at the water, sure that she would be sucked back under at any moment.

"Stop that. Stop thrashing around. _Lydia._ Listen. Stop moving around. I'll hold you up."

She choked up more water. She fought every instinct she had and held still. For a moment she could feel herself going back down, and she tilted her face up to keep it above the slowly churning water. But then she bobbed back up.

"Don't panic. The worst thing you can do is panic. Move your arms back and forth like this, slowly. Push the water down and away. Keep your legs straight and kick them underneath you."

_That_ made a difference. She kicked her legs out straight, and suddenly rose another few inches out of the water. "They're coming," she said, eyeing the shore. She couldn't see them yet, but she was sure she soon would.

"Let's go. Do the same thing you were just doing now, but sideways." They tilted to the side and Lydia moved her arms back and forth to float. Her legs slowly sank below her, and she kicked hard. They floated back up. _This isn't so hard._ Then Harris let go of her arm. She tipped to the side and was submerged again. She flailed her arms wildly. _Push the water down._ She paddled her arms like he'd shown her, and raised her head above the water again. Her hair was plastered over the front of her face and water dripped in her eyes. Harris was floating a few feet away, looking back at the bank. Lydia reached out and clung to his arm. This probably made it more difficult for him to stay afloat, but he didn't say so. They moved across the river inch by inch, drifting back southeast in the current.

"We're going to have to go under," he said.

"Under?"

"We're moving too slowly. They'll be here any second. It will be more difficult for them to hit us if we're underwater."

Lydia nodded, and was about to ask what she should do when a woman in a familiar navy uniform ran up to the nearby bank. She drew a plasma pistol.

"Hold your breath," Harris said, and she had just enough time to take in a lungful of air before he dove, pulling her with him. She squinted her eyes shut and kicked blindly as he pulled her down. They stopped. She reached out, and she could feel the sand of the riverbed. A piece of metal jutted from the ground, and she held onto it. The thick static of the churning water filled her ears, but through it she could hear periodical muffled streaming sounds.

She felt Harris reach over and touch her face, putting a hand next to her eyes. She opened them tentatively. A blurry vision of the ghoul appeared in front of her. The river water made her eyes feel strange and-unexpectedly-dry, but it didn't really hurt. With one hand she held on to Harris, and her other gripped the frame of a rusted-out station wagon that had somehow found its way to the bottom of the river. She looked up to the surface, and there were streams of plasma coming toward them. The viscous green fluid slowed as soon as it hit the surface, and dissolved harmlessly into the water by the time it got to them.

Harris pointed to her laser gun and held out his hand. Lydia took it from her side, almost dropping it, and gave it to him. He pointed to her again, then out toward the other bank. On the riverbed, an underwater dam of concrete and rebar and metal and wood scraps had formed. She could pull her way across underwater. She reluctantly let go of him and pulled herself forward. She kicked and paddled to keep herself from floating up, then caught a handhold on the opposite side of the car. She already felt the urge to breathe.

Behind her, Harris hung onto the car with one arm and aimed the pistol up in the direction of the Bureau agents with his other. Unlike the plasma, the laser cut through the water with ease, losing none of the speed or accuracy it had above water.

Lydia made her way forward as fast as possible-that is, not very. She pulled and kicked, and it was much faster than just swimming would have been, but she knew she would have to go up for air soon, and she wasn't far enough away from the SRB agents. She put one hand in front of the other, pulling on a twisted ladder, a two-by-four, a chain. She glanced behind her, and Harris was still shooting.

Finally, she couldn't wait any longer. She thought she would die if she spent even another second underwater. She let go of the pipe she was holding and propelled herself upward. _Don't panic._ She shoved at the water with her arms. _Don't panic._ The pitch of the noise of the water got higher and higher as she rose. She kept thinking she would break the surface, but it was taking an eternity.

Then she could feel the air on her face. She gasped and choked as she struggled to keep herself up. She was getting tired. Suddenly she saw herself getting so exhausted that she couldn't hold herself up anymore. She'd sink and drown. It seemed a very real possibility. She paddled and kicked harder as she tried to keep water out of her mouth.

Plasma collided with the water next to her face. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the woman aiming at her. The red light of a laser erupted from the water and shot by her, and she ducked. Sucking in another breath, Lydia tried to dive. She thrust her head back underwater, only to have her buoyant lungs hold her at the surface. She pulled at the water, but her legs still floated uselessly above the surface. She felt another glob of plasma hit the water near her.

A hand closed around her arm and pulled her firmly down out of harm's way. She looked down. Max smiled up at her, his floating hair forming a halo around his head. He was standing there on the sand with apparently no trouble at all, only wobbling slightly with the pull of the current. He pulled her down farther, until she could reach the broken chunk of concrete next to him. She didn't waste any time trying to communicate with him, but quickly pulled herself farther along the riverbed. Max waded along behind her, moving in slow motion. He must have been much heavier than a human, because he had no problem staying down.

As she was beginning to feel the pull of the need to breathe, the ground began sloping up. She gratefully kicked forward. The pile of debris that had stacked itself along the bottom of the river ended, so she swatted at the silt instead. _Do not panic._

She scooped away at the water with cupped hands and kicked her legs out straight. A series of laborious strokes later, she reached the surface. She coughed up some liquid, then hurried out of the water and up the bank. She heard someone splashing along behind her, and turned to see Harris, bent over and still shooting at the people who now lined the opposite bank. Someone with a plasma rifle was shooting back, with much higher accuracy than Harris, she noticed. The green streaks narrowly missed them, one of them grazing Harris's jacket. He quickly sent several more lasers their way, then turned and sprinted away.

Along the bank was a wall like those that flanked the river inside the city limits. Here it was still present, but largely broken apart. A section near them contained a staircase that went up the side of the wall. They rushed up the stairs and behind the protruding wall at the top. Tulip and Andy were already crouched behind it. The shots behind them ceased as they took cover.

Harris pulled the side of his jacket away from his body to look at it. There was a large burn hole forming in the side. The edges of it still expanded slowly. Lydia looked him up and down. He didn't appear to have been hit anywhere else. After examining himself, he turned to her and quickly looked her over, as well. They realized at about the same time what the other was doing. Lydia smiled.

Harris turned to Andy. "What are you still doing here?"

"Where else would I go?" he replied. "I still haven't got a weapon. Wouldn't be very intelligent to run off by myself."

"Where's Max?" Tulip asked.

"Here," the android said, rushing around the corner amidst a barrage of plasma that was, perhaps, lighter than what had been thrown upon the others. He squatted at the edge of the wall beside Harris. "Is everyone alright?"

Tulip nodded. "We're okay. Are they staying on the other side there?"

"Yes. I don't think they'll come after us, but they will keep shooting." He stuck his head around the corner, then quickly brought it back. "They're going downriver. It won't be too long before they find a crossing. We should leave before they find their way back."


	10. Chapter 10

It was cold.

Very cold.

Despite the sun, their wet clothes refused to dry. They clung to them like a second skin of ice. For fear of being found again, they put up with the cold and damp until a few hours later. As the sun was setting, they came upon a residential area and found a house to stay in for the night. It was big, but it was well insulated and relatively intact, so it was warmer inside than out.

A brief search of the house revealed wardrobes upstairs that lent them each a change of clothes. They took turns digging through the cabinets and changing in the bedrooms. Lydia found that the armoire in the larger bedroom contained only clothes that were much too big for her, so she went down the hall into the smaller room. Next to a bunk bed was a large case of Grognak comics, each individually wrapped in a plastic sleeve. There were posters covering a good percentage of the wall space-also Grognak. In the chest of drawers she found a pair of jeans that, while a little smaller than she would have liked, fit well enough. She pulled something fuzzy out of the drawer, held it up to check the size, then pulled it over her head. She realized after she put it on that there was a large spaceship embroidered on the front.

Andy and Max were standing outside the larger bedroom, presumably waiting for Harris to finish changing. Tulip had evidently gone back downstairs. Lydia pulled a blanket from one of the bunk beds, put all the comics inside of it, then carried the makeshift sling downstairs. Tulip was sitting on her knees next to her backpack, holding a bag of potato chips. Lydia set the comics down, pulled the blanket out from under them, and wrapped it around herself as she sat down near Tulip.

"You ever read Grognak?

Tulip looked up at her from under her eyelids. She crunched a chip. "Read what?"

"Grognak. The barbarian. You know, the comics."

"Never heard of them."

Lydia quickly dug through the stack of comics. The previous owner had apparently never obtained the first issue. The oldest one in the stack was number three. She took it out of the pile and handed it to Tulip, who took it without much interest. Then she started paging through it. Her eyebrows raised slightly. "Wow. This is in really good condition." She held it up closer to her face. "You can still see all the letters." She flipped through the book, glancing at the pictures. When she got to the end, she turned back to the first page and began reading. She slowly lowered the book and set it on the floor, her bag of chips abandoned.

Lydia picked out an issue she'd never read and turned her flashlight on it. (In addition to having a bulb that apparently lasted forever, it appeared to be waterproof and, to her delight, hadn't been damaged in the river.)

"You know, Grognak would look just like a super mutant if you painted him green," she noticed.

Tulip snorted. She read quietly for a few minutes before speaking.

"I don't like comics that much."

"Why?"

"I don't know. This is just silly. It's alright, I guess." She paused thoughtfully. "Look at this." She held the booklet up and pointed to a row of panels. "You can hardly even tell what's happening. It's just a guy beating up about fifty other guys. I assume there's supposed to be a story hidden in there somewhere?"

"Yeah, there's a story..." Lydia trailed off vaguely. She searched the page she had open for an example of the plot, but her search was fruitless. She shrugged. "It's not my favorite either, but it's fun to read. I _like_ the fighting. Don't you wish you could fight like that?"

"I hate fighting," Tulip said with a small frown.

Lydia shrugged again, one-shouldered. She looked back down at the comic book. Tulip brought hers back down to the floor and was quickly absorbed in it again, despite said silliness.

Lydia looked up again when she heard Harris on the stairs. He was carrying his rucksack over a shoulder and his rifle and her pistol in his other hand. The outfit he'd assembled consisted of jeans and a blue sweater with a green argyle sweater vest over the top. Lydia suppressed a small giggle.

He handed her back the laser gun, which he'd carried on the way there since the river, she assumed because his non-energy weapons were more likely to malfunction when they were waterlogged. Addressing that issue, he sat down near them, placing his pack to the side, and began disassembling his assault rifle.

In another short while, Max descended the stairs, as well. He asked if he could help Harris, who thanked him but declined, so he instead sat next to Tulip and read curiously over her shoulder. Lydia wondered why he'd had to change in the first place (she doubted the cold or the wet bothered him, though she could have been wrong), but she didn't ask about it.

She was just getting into the comic book again when she heard the door upstairs open and close one more time. She looked up, and Andy was standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, his blue uniform gone. He held a blanket over one arm. He paused to peer over the railing and look down at them all expressionlessly. Lydia looked back. When his eyes passed over her, he nodded politely. She watched him go quietly down the stairs and into another room that might have been a kitchen.

Harris looked up at the door that Andy disappeared through as it shut, then went back to drying and oiling the gun.

"There could be knives in there," Lydia said in a slightly lowered voice, in case the ex-slaver overheard. "Or any number of other things. Do you think we're safe sleeping here?"

Harris's hands paused again and looked at the door. "Yes. He doesn't seem to have held a grudge against us for ruining his career and killing his partner. Even if he did, he's a coward. I very much doubt he would attack us." He looked at her with faded blue eyes. "Do you agree?"

Lydia nodded. Everything he'd said was true. You could never be too careful, however. "Do you think you'll wake up if he comes near us?" She knew _she_ wouldn't.

"I won't sleep," Max said quietly. "I'll be able to intercept him, if no one else can."

"Thank you," Lydia said. Then, as she took in what he'd said, "You don't sleep?"

"I can, but I rarely have to." He gave her a shy smile.

She tried not to shiver. He didn't breathe or sleep, and she'd never seen him eat, either. Was there anything human about him other than the way he looked?

Bu that insecure smile- _that_ was human. Robots weren't usually self conscious about the fact that they were robots. Could that be programmed?

She'd never encountered AI anywhere near as advanced as what Max had. Like he'd said, it was unstable. It seemed to have grown into something beyond what even the people who made him had intended. There had to be something else there, for him to have gone as far as to consciously override sections of his own programming, and go directly against the wishes of his creators. She wasn't sure that that 'something else' was human, but it certainly wasn't the trait of an ordinary machine.

Whatever he was, she owed him her life several times over. Although, admittedly, she'd only been in danger in the first place because of her proximity to him. Nevertheless, when that Synth Retention Bureau android had her at his mercy, Max had been willing to sacrifice his freedom to spare her pain, if not her life. He could easily have run off and left her. And she had no doubt that that thing would have just killed her if he had.

Some robots, she knew, were designed to be completely nonviolent. They could not hurt a human or allow one to come to harm. Max didn't seem to be part of this group, but it was possible he had some modified version of it that wouldn't allow him to leave her if she was threatened.

_Hm._ Maybe he wasn't so virtuous after all.

"Max," she said. She'd recalled something she'd forgotten about until now. The SRB had been holding something over his head that sounded suspiciously similar to what she'd just been imagining.

He looked up instantly. "Yes?"

"When we were in the tunnels, the agents said something about 'operators'. What does that mean?"

Tulip gave Lydia a mildly disapproving look. Max's forehead creased. He hesitated.

_He can't lie, that much I know. From what's happened in the past, I'll bet he can't leave a question posed to him unanswered, either._

"My operator...is my owner," he said slowly. "Technically. I don't really think of it that way." He cleared his throat (a gesture that Lydia was now sure was completely unnecessary). "The name comes from early in the robotics industry: robots didn't always work as well independently as they do now. They'd have designated 'operators' to keep them on course with verbal commands and such, or to issue overrides if they got indecisive or were malfunctioning. It's basically the same status as it was then, it's just used slightly differently."

"So what does it mean now?"

"In practice, being an operator does two things. First, it makes me better able to protect whoever it is who is given that status. In general, my model has a block on physical violence against humans. However, if my operator is threatened by another human, I am able to incapacitate or even kill the assailant to prevent harm from coming to the operator."

_Aha._

"Second..." He was slower to voice this next item. "I must obey orders given by an operator, with several exceptions. I cannot be ordered to harm or kill another human who isn't a direct threat to the operator. I cannot be ordered to lie to another human, or to steal something that I know is the property of someone else. This is to prevent espionage and other unsavory political activities that less scrupulous Commonwealth citizens might want to utilize us for. I doubt they were thinking of the safety of civilians when they thought of these rules; more they were watching their own backs."

Lydia noted his sudden change to a more formal tone with distant interest. "But not every model has these rules."

"No, as you can see. Some models are designed to be fighters, and their restrictions reflect that. I am not."

"I'm guessing the other N5s don't have this ability to choose who their operators are?"

"No, they don't." He'd developed that on his own somehow, it seemed.

"How many operators do you have, then?"

"Only two. Tulip, and you."

_And that's why they were threatening me. Not being able to protect an operator hurts him somehow._ Her being an operator made things more difficult for him, but he had made her one anyway. That was the type of illogical decision she wouldn't expect from an android. They were meant to replicate human behavior but not, she suspected, to the extent that they endangered themselves.

She turned back to her comic. The others may or may not have noticed that she didn't turn the page for the rest of the evening. She stared at the pictures and glanced over the letters, but Grognak was not what she was thinking about.

When Tulip was bored with the comics, or maybe too tired to keep reading, she and Max retired to the larger upstairs bedroom. Lydia was amazed to see that she'd gotten through almost half the stack.

Lydia looked at her wrist to check the time, only to find the blue material of her sweater instead of the glowing green screen that, for some reason, she had expected to see. She shook her head. No one cared about the time out here, anyway. Go to bed when it's dark and get up when it's light.

She gathered her blanket around herself and stood up, shaking the numbness out of her legs. Harris had been sitting propped up against the wall with his eyes closed. When she got up, he followed her up the stairs.

When they got to the smaller room, Lydia knelt down to untie her boots. Her feet were more sore than usual. Holding onto the metal ladder attached to the bed with one hand, she went to pull the shoe off with her other. There was a small, ominous sound. She paused and looked at Harris apprehensively.

"Careful," he advised.

She slowly pulled the boot the rest of the way off.

"Crap," she murmured. Her sock was left inside the shoe. In the small amount of moonlight coming through the window, she could just see the large quantity of skin that had been left behind. It was much worse than the rest of her body. Her foot was rubbed raw and red. The callouses on her heel and the ball of her foot were much thinner than she remembered, and the skin on her instep was translucent enough that she could trace blue veins and white ligaments all the way from her toes to her ankle.

She took off the other shoe, then pulled the socks out of both. She walked painfully over the wood floor (hoping she wouldn't get splinters), shoved the window open, and threw the socks out. There were plenty more in the dresser.

She turned around to see Harris sitting on the lower bed, watching her. She looked away and went to push her boots out of the way of the ladder. She was quiet for a moment, then she laughed once.

"What?"

"Nothing," she said, but she continued, "I was almost embarrassed for a second, but then I remembered what _you_ look like." She smiled at him, but the expression disappeared almost immediately. "Um. That sounded much more rude than I meant for it to. You know I was just kidding, right?"

"I'm aware of what I look like."

"I know. But I didn't mean that. I'm just so used to seeing you, I don't really think about it..." Now that she thought of it, Harris and Tulip looked more normal to her than Max and Andy did. "The way you look is...is..." _Amazing,_ she finished in her head as she flailed for the words. _A living corpse. Painless vivisection. The inner workings of the human body, put on display. A testament to the resiliency of the human race and the triumph of evolution in creating it._ As Harris looked up at her, her face was suddenly heating up. "I like it," she said weakly.

Harris stared at her. "Thank you," he said uncertainly.

Lydia shrugged. Harris pushed his rucksack under the bed and leaned over the bed to prop his rifle up in the corner. She watched him steady the gun carefully against the wall, making sure it wouldn't fall over.

She threw her blanket onto the top bunk and clambered up the ladder. There was still a pillow sitting neatly at the head of the bed, covered in dust. She held it over the edge of the bed and slapped at it. Clouds rose away and evanesced into the air as she hit it. When she was done, she sat back and watched the particles. They swirled wildly when they were first released, then slowed gradually until they settled on another surface or disappeared into the dark or hung suspended in the shaft of moonlight coming through the window.

Harris sneezed.

"Sorry."

He grunted in response. Lydia heard him stretch out on the mattress below. She leaned over the edge of her own. "Thanks for the help today, in the river."

"You're welcome."

"Although, I wouldn't have minded if you didn't send me off alone after one minute of lessons," she added with a small smile.

"Yeah." He looked away from her in an expression that might have passed for embarrassed, if you had a magnifying glass. "I would rather have not had to do that, but Tulip and Andy were still farther up. I was trying to keep the fire off of them. And I knew Max was not far ahead of you."

"I know," she assured him, rolling over and pulling the blankets on the bed over her.

Today she'd been attacked by super mutants, raiders, and the Synth Retention Bureau. She'd almost drowned. There was an inhumanly strong and disobedient robot in the room down the hall and a man who had once enslaved her sleeping on the floor below them. She almost laughed. "How are we still alive?"

"I know exactly what you mean," Harris said back.

As usual, Lydia fell asleep without trouble. Staying asleep was another problem. Several times during the night she woke up chilled. It hadn't felt that cold when she got in the bed earlier that night, but the longer she laid still, the colder she got.

The third or fourth time she awoke, she turned over and scrunched herself into a ball in an attempt to conserve heat. She pulled the blankets closer to her, and she felt the edge of one of them creeping over the tips of her toes. She sat up to redistribute the disheveled sheets evenly over herself. The bed creaked and wobbled. She lay back down.

Some minutes later, she was still freezing enough that she couldn't get back to sleep. She wrapped the blankets tighter around herself. It didn't help much. She thrust her head under the pillow. There was a slight draft coming in through the broken window, and she could feel it even through the blankets. She sighed. It came out as a jagged, shivering breath.

"Please stop fidgeting, Lydia," came an exasperated and groggy voice.

She leaned over the edge of the bed. "Sorry," she whispered. _He_ didn't look cold at all. He was stretched out on his back, not scrunched up like she was.

"Can I sleep with you?" she asked.

His eyes opened. "What?"

"Can I please sleep in your bed? I'm cold."

"Um..." He blinked. "...Okay."

She took all the sheets and blankets from her bed into her arms and threw them on the floor. She climbed down the ladder, wincing as her aching feet touched the icy metal. Taking up the blankets, she spread them out on top of Harris's comforter. "The only time I remember being this cold was when the heating unit in the Vault went out. I hope it's not always like this this time of year."

"It's only Fall now. It will get worse."

"Great," Lydia muttered.

As she finished arranging the blankets, she crawled over the top of him to the other side of the small bunk.

"Ow."

"Sorry." She crawled under the covers, curling into a ball, and pulled them up to her eyes. She was already warmer. She resisted the urge to scoot closer to Harris. He had turned to his side and moved to the other edge of the bed, as far away from her as possible.


	11. Chapter 11

" _Tulip_ ," Lydia called.

She looked up from the comic she was reading, and reluctantly picked up her pace to catch up to the others. She kept falling behind. This time she'd slowed gradually until she had come to a complete stop. Max walked beside her. He'd stopped trying to get her attention and make her hurry after she'd shrugged him off the first several times.

They'd walked for quite a few days without any interruption. The quiet relaxed the group. Max and Tulip lagged behind. Andy wandered off to the side by himself, strangely divorced from the rest but still unwilling to leave. Harris was roughly in the front and everyone else followed. Lydia stayed close by him.

"Stop picking," he reminded her.

She dropped her hand away from her cheek and looked absently upward. It had been sunny earlier, and the sky had been blue. Now the clouds gathered and streamed across the sky as though in a race to the horizon.

"Look at the clouds," Lydia said.

"I see."

"I've never seen them do that before."

"It'll storm soon," Harris said.

"What do you mean 'it'll storm' "?

"Rain, wind, maybe lightning. The usual."

"That's not usual. I've never seen that."

"You haven't been here long."

"Is it dangerous?"

"The weather?" He looked down at her, and a tiny smirk grew on his face.

"Well, how am I supposed to know?" she said reproachfully.

He shrugged amenably. "It's much less dangerous than most everything else we encounter in the Wastes. We'll have to find someplace with a roof, that's all."

They went through a neighborhood not long after that, but decided not to stop. They weren't in a particularly big hurry, but there was no sense staying when they still had half the day to travel, and it hadn't started raining yet. The farther they moved, the harder it would be for the Bureau to find them again.

Tulip had finished the last of the comics a ways back. She'd been carrying them (or, to be exact, Max was), having refused to just dump them on the ground. When they passed a house that was still standing, she stopped to deposit the books inside for someone else to find.

Harris was watching something behind Lydia. She turned to see what was so interesting.

"Don't look," he said, and she stopped. "Behind you, on the left."

She paused in puzzlement, then leaned down to adjust her shoelaces. As she tied them, she surreptitiously scanned the houses to her left. There was some movement distantly, figures going between two houses. Just as soon as she saw them, they were gone again.

"The Synth Retention Bureau?" she said as she stood. "How did they find us?"

"No. Not them. Did you see the white on their armor?"

All she'd seen was a dark blur. She shrugged.

"They're mercenaries. Talon Company."

"How long have they been there?"

"I saw them yesterday. I wasn't sure that they were following us until now."

"What do you think they want?"

He just shook his head.

Tulip talked with Max for a while after that, but soon they quieted and all there was to hear were soft footsteps and the sound of the wind picking up and blowing through their clothes. Lydia hunched her shoulders and stuffed her hands in her pockets. All her new layers were no match against the wind-it blew straight through them and chilled her skin as it hit her.

"Tulip, do you know anything about Egyptian mythology?" she asked.

The woman quickened her stride to catch up to Lydia and Harris. "Egyptian? Never heard of it."

"Would you like to?" At least it would give her something to do other than whine internally about the temperature.

"Is it as interesting as Greek?"

"One of their gods was sealed in a coffin while still alive, thrown into the river, pulled out, cut into 14 parts, then resurrected and put back together, only to die again."

Tulip laughed. "How did that come about?"

As Lydia described the myth, Tulip listened silently. She continued on to other myths she knew, not necessarily in their entirety or in chronological order, because she didn't remember them all perfectly. No one else jumped in, so she kept going for a while. At one point she noticed that Andy had wandered closer and was walking near enough to be able to hear clearly. She realized, suddenly, that it must be a rare gift to know someone who knew as many stories as she did. There weren't a lot of intact projectors around, and the people who did have them probably charged admission for other people to watch. The lack of books was obvious, and Lydia guessed that a lot of people didn't even know how to read, even if they got their hands on them. It seemed likely that most tales were told verbally.

By the time Lydia wrapped up her last story, breathing hard from walking and talking for so long, the breeze had picked up enough to be an annoyance. Sand and dirt blew in her face, and she squinted to keep it out of her eyes. Tiny tornadoes formed in inlets under cliffsides, and gusts blew hard enough to make her stagger sideways on occasion. She shielded her eyes with her hands and looked down. It was getting darker, and she wasn't sure if that was because night was coming or because of all the dust filtering the light. She looked up now and again, but she saw nothing but an expanse of land. Maybe they should have stopped at the neighborhood they saw before.

The ground beneath Lydia's feet changed, and, looking down, she realized that she'd stepped off the dirt and onto a slab of asphalt. The highway.

Andy stepped over a guard rail on her left. He held his arm up over his brow. His sleeve flapped wildly. "We should walk down the road," he said, speaking for the first time in hours. "There'll be someplace along the way where we can stop."

"But they'll be able to find us easier if we're following a highway," Tulip said.

Andy shrugged.

"He's right," Harris said. "It's either that or the rain. We haven't got much time."

So they followed the road west. It turned out to be a wise decision. Not ten minutes later, Lydia was startled to feel a drop of water hit her nose. She faltered and stopped in place. "That was rain," she said. "Rain hit me." She looked skyward. More droplets swirled with the air currents. Another one splashed onto her. She blinked and stared at them, mesmerized, as they fell toward the earth.

Tulip put a hand on her back and pushed her forward. "Come on, we need to get inside. I think I see something up ahead."

The airborne dust still obscured their vision, but they soon saw that she was right. Ahead, beyond a curve in the road, was a large parking lot next to a building. Surprisingly, nearly every parking space in the lot had a car in it.

The rain started to fall harder. It was growing in strength at a speed that was unnerving, for Lydia at least. Soon it pounded against them from an angle so sharp it was nearly sideways. It quickly settled much of the dirt in the air, but the downpour itself made it almost as difficult to see as before.

They ran the rest of the distance to the building. Lydia realized that her skin itched. Even burned, in some places. The rain was acidic.

Andy reached the door first and pulled at the handle. It didn't move. "It's locked," he said to them, speaking loudly to be heard over the rain.

"Move," Harris said. Andy stepped away, and Harris swung his rifle down from his shoulder and shot a few rounds into the dead bolt. The lock dissolved and the door swung open.

They all rushed inside, slamming the door behind them. It didn't stay shut all the way now, but swung inward again in the wind. They all hesitated there, looking over the building. It was a habit you tended to develop when you spent most of your nights in abandoned houses that didn't belong to you and you'd never seen before.

Much of the outer wall of the building had been glass, broken long ago and replaced with mismatched wood panels or sheets of metal. There was only one floor, but the ceiling was very high. It looked to have been built mostly of cement, which explained how so much of it still stood. There was a long counter to the left and in front of them was a banner hanging from the ceiling. _Dixon Ford,_ it read. The color had faded greatly from the sun, but it appeared to have once been red, white, and blue.

On the right was a round dais with a car sitting on it on the right. Why someone would put a car inside a building, she had no idea, but it was the best condition she'd ever seen one in. At first she'd thought it was covered in rust, but she realized the red was too bright to be rust-it was paint.

Harris was the first to go forward. He walked down the center aisle in the building, down a narrow red carpet that covered the linoleum floor. Lydia followed. There was little cover in the room aside from the car and the counter. Harris checked the latter first. At the far end of the counter, he leaned over to look behind it.

Immediately he stiffened and braced the weapon against his shoulder. Lydia waited for him to shoot, but something made him hesitate. Then there was an echoing bang that made Lydia's heart drop into her stomach. Harris's head was thrown backward at the impact and he dropped to the ground behind her.

Without thinking, Lydia vaulted over the top of the counter to attack the person on the other side before they could regroup. She landed feet-first on top of a girl, who, if not injured, was at least thrown off-balance into a sitting position. She put her hands back to catch her fall.

Lydia kicked her in the chin, knocking her to the floor. She spotted the flashing metal of a gun that the girl was trying to raise again, and slammed her foot down on the hand holding it. The girl cried out and raised her other arm protectively over her head as Lydia aimed her own gun.

There was a whimper from the wall behind the counter. Lydia paused, but didn't move her aim from the center of the girl's head. She wasn't going to make the same mistake Harris did. She flicked her eyes quickly up to the wall, then back at the girl. She flicked them up again.

A boy, three or four years old, stood huddled against the wall. As Lydia watched, he whined quietly. She could tell he was trying very hard not to cry. It wasn't working. She looked back at the girl under her, who lowered her arm slightly and gazed at Lydia fiercely.

"Harris?" Lydia called. She knew there would be no answer.

Max came up beside her and picked up the girl's dropped pistol. He raised it so that it was pointed approximately at the girl's body. Even he should be able to hit her at this short distance. He stood over her, taking Lydia's place. She hurriedly backed around the counter, terrified of what she would see when she turned around.

Harris looked like a ragdoll parody of himself. He lay sprawled on the floor in front of the counter in a small pool of blood that shone on the linoleum. Lydia leaned over to see the wound in his head. There was a bloody trail of torn flesh that started at the upper right corner of his forehead and traveled several inches back. It was not a fatal wound. The bullet had only grazed his skull. She put her fingers to his throat to reassure herself. The pulse there was the most lovely thing she'd ever felt.

She reached behind him and into his pack to retrieve a stimpak. She wasn't sure this even required one, but this way she wouldn't have to do stitches, and his concussion (because he undoubtedly had one) would be fixed. She injected him, then stood and set the empty needle on the counter.

"Is there anyone else here?" she asked. There was no answer. She leaned over the counter to look at the girl on the floor.

She was propped on her elbows, still looking furious. "No," she said through blood-covered teeth. The boy sniffed and sobbed quietly.

There was a door in the wall at the end of the counter, in the back of the building. Lydia checked inside. There were a few file cabinets and a desk. The room was completely walled off. No windows.

Tulip had moved up to see what was going on, her gun drawn at her side. Andy hovered near the door. Lydia waved him over. They picked up Harris and moved him into the back room, setting him on the floor, for lack of a better place. Lydia took off his pack and moved it under his head as a makeshift pillow.

They went back out into the main room. The sound of the rain filled the otherwise quiet space. The door was still open, so Tulip had propped one of the chairs against it to hold it shut. The sound was muffled, but Lydia could still hear it pounding on the roof. _Like hundreds of fingers drumming on the ceiling._

She went back to the counter. The girl was sitting back against the wall with her arm around the boy. Max had lowered the gun, but still stood there, watching them.

"What do you want?" the girl said.

"Wewant a place to get out of the rain," Lydia replied. "Is that a reason to go shooting at us?"

"You shot first," the girl snapped.

Lydia was taken aback. Then she remembered that they _had_ shot first. "The door was locked."

"You could have tried knocking," the girl said disdainfully. The boy next to her seemed calmed by the presence of conversation rather than gunfire, and had stopped crying, though tears still streaked his face. He wiped his nose. She squeezed his shoulder encouragingly. "What was I supposed to think? Not fifteen minutes ago there's a bunch of sketchy-looking guys with guns out running around outside, then somebody starts machine-gunning the door."

"A bunch of guys?" Max repeated.

"Yeah." She sniffed and wiped blood from her nose and mouth with the back of her hand. "I guess you aren't with them. They all had uniforms. Like police or something."

It was quiet for a minute. Tulip went to the front wall and peeked out of a crack between two sheets of metal. "I don't see anyone," she reported.

Andy was looking nervously between them all. He took half a step back.

"Andy," Lydia started.

"Sorry. I'm not going back with them," he vowed, and yanked open the door. He bolted out into the rain, the door bouncing behind him.

Lydia ran to catch the door and looked outside, but he was already gone. She swept her gaze left to right through the parking lot. The rain, which could now accurately be called torrential, obscured everything more than ten yards away. She might have seen the shadow of a figure moving in the distance, but maybe it was just a distortion from the waves of water in the air. She closed the door and propped the chair against it again, cursing him under her breath.

"I have to go," Max said. "I'll draw them away from here. They'll send the other synths after me."

"You can't go by yourself," Tulip objected. "Anyway, some of them will stay here to kill us. What about them? Even if it's only half of them, just me and Lydia won't have a chance against them."

Max looked pained.

"We also don't have a chance against all of them, even with Max helping," Lydia said grimly. "He might as well go."

"If it's you they want, why don't you turn yourself in?" the girl on the floor said. "I don't want to get involved in this."

Max paused. Lydia spoke for him. "It's too late. If they kill us, they'll kill you. They have nothing to lose by doing so."

Max looked sick. He took a step toward the door, then paused, glancing at Tulip. He went back to the room at the back of the building and checked inside. "Can't you wake him up?" he asked Lydia.

She shook her head sadly. Max combed his hair back with his fingers and shifted his weight from his left foot to his right. He ran his hand over his hair. It was an action that was probably meant to look human, but somehow, it was the least human thing she'd seen him do. The way he moved became more mechanical, less fluid, as he repeated the motion over and over and over...

"Max, go," Lydia said.

It was phrased as an order. Lydia doubted if it overrode the synth's need to protect his operators, but in this situation it probably tipped the balance enough to allow him to make a decision. He stopped petting his hair and looked at her with a mixture of relief and sadness. He handed the girl's gun to Lydia and went to the door. "I'll...I'll go to the intersection of route 267 and interstate 66. You can meet me there."

Tulip nodded and hugged him tightly. He squeezed back. He said something to her, too quietly for Lydia to hear, then released her. He looked back at them one last time. "Please don't die," he begged earnestly. Had the mood been less serious, Lydia might have laughed at the ridiculousness of the request. He opened the door and stood silhouetted in the doorway for a moment, perhaps waiting for agents outside, wherever they were, to notice him. The rain bounced off of him and made a fuzzy corona around his body. Then, he turned left and sprinted away.

Tulip closed the door again and watched the lot through a crack in the boards along the front of the store. Lydia turned to the kids behind the counter. "Are you alright?" she asked slowly, hesitant to show any politeness whatsoever to someone who had come within an inch of killing Harris.

The girl sniffed and shrugged.

"There they go," Tulip said from the front of the building. "A bunch of them just went off after Max." She turned away and went back to the counter.

"I'm sorry that you had to get roped into this, but you're going to have to help," Lydia said to the girl.

"Oh yeah?" she snorted. "Why do you think I'm going to do that?"

"Because you'll both be killed if you don't. That's the way they work. They'll have been told to kill the people in this building, and I doubt they'll take the time to discriminate between the red-headed girl they're after and the blonde one who's just a bystander."

The girl touched her dirty yellow hair defensively. The anger had finally left her face, replaced by worry.

Lydia handed her back her gun. "You can put your...son?"

"My _brother_ ," she corrected indignantly, snatching back her gun.

"He can stay in the back room, behind us."

The girl nodded and hurried him inside. Lydia followed her in and took all the stimpaks she could find on Harris and in his pack. Shutting the door securely behind them, they all crouched behind the counter. "Stay away from the door," the girl called back to the boy, then turned to the others. "Do we have a plan?"

"Shoot them more times than they shoot you," Tulip said.

There was a whining noise outside, rapidly growing in pitch and volume.

"What is that?" Lydia said.

Then the staccato of rapid automatic gunfire filled the room. They all ducked closer to the floor, protected by the wide counter. Plasma flew by and wood and metal chunks exploded from the front of the building and shot all over the room. Lydialeaned down and covered her head with her arms. Pieces of debris landed on her back.

The shooting went on and on, and Lydia thought that the feebly rebuilt facade of the building must have disintegrated by now. Finally the sound stopped, and the quiet buzzed in her ears. Or maybe that was the rain. She raised her eyes just above the countertop. Indeed, much of the makeshift wall was destroyed, and what wasn't was dotted with burn holes dripping with the green goo. There was a line across the entire front wall where the shooter had concentrated fire, and most everything below the line had fallen away, leaving a line of jagged toothlike structures hanging from the ceiling.

She could see several pairs of feet below the half of the wall that was left. The cement wall at the back of the building was eroding along a line parallel to the floor. The car had similar disfigurements. Part of the line of plasma had crossed very close to the gas tank. It was a good thing he wasn't aiming a foot higher.

_Wait._

She looked back at the door. Someone was pushing it open. The chair behind it was long gone. She ducked behind the counter and looked out beyond the side of it instead of over the top. "I'm going to blow up the car," she whispered to Tulip and the blonde girl. "Stay behind the counter."

"You're going to _what_?" Tulip hissed.

They quieted when the front door, hanging from a single hinge, swung open with a squeak. A soft footstep sounded on the linoleum, then another. Lydia leaned her arm on her knee to steady the gun. She squinted one eye at the sights. She fired, and a black spot appeared on the red paint of the car. There was no explosion. The footsteps stopped. Then they moved again, quickening their pace.

Lydia quickly shot again, clumsily, but she hit something in the back of the car. Something popped. A flame spouted from it.

A hot wave of green shot past her face as the person fired toward the end of the counter. Chunks of it went flying off the corner and struck her. She fell back from the counter and fired again. There was an ear-splitting sound and a flash of light. Lydia threw her arms over her head and scrunched herself into a ball as shrapnel flew over them. There was a thump on the other side of the counter-the shooter, she hoped. A yard-long slice of flaming metal hit the wall behind them and clattered to the floor, just missing Tulip.

Someone at the entrance shouted. Lydia couldn't hear what they said over the ringing in her ears. She quickly looked around the edge of the counter, through the hole made by the automatic plasma weapon. More navy-suited people poured into the room. She fired and hit one of them in the stomach. Tulip and the blonde girl fired over the counter, and the agents scattered.

Lydia pulled her trigger again, but nothing happened. Darting back behind the counter, she ripped open the weapon, discarded the empty power cell, and pulled another one from her pocket to put in. _Stupid. Should have reloaded before they got here._ In this pause, she noticed that the Bureau members were still firing, but they weren't hitting the counter or the wall behind her. She peered around at them again. They were shooting far above them. She looked up. A crack was forming in the ceiling, and chunks of rock were falling to the floor.

She dove to the side just in time to dodge a large falling piece of ceiling. It crashed to the floor and broke into several pieces. Tulip and the blonde girl had moved in the other direction. Someone-the girl, Lydia thought-shouted in pain.

She looked up and fired again. Someone was alarmingly close to her. She grazed the person's leg and they staggered, but then their foot came up and kicked the weapon from her hands. They leveled a glowing green barrel at her face.


	12. Chapter 12

Something inside Andy twisted violently when the girl on the wall mentioned the Synth Retention Bureau uniforms. He couldn't stay. He couldn't go back with them. The thought of even seeing them made him panic. Before he could calm himself, he'd rushed out the door and into the rain. He ran around the corner to the right side of the building and paused, pressing his back to the wall. Where could he go? Where would the agents be? What if they had surrounded the building?

He squinted through the rain, through the rivulets running down his face and stinging his eyes. All he could see was a sheet of falling water. He couldn't run blindly into that. He kept seeing an image of one of the synths emerging from the silver fog of rain, reaching out with a deceptively thin arm and closing long fingers around his throat, as one had when he'd made a comment that was deemed rude by one of the human agents.

On the wall he stood against, a few feet away, was a bench. Spotting it, he dropped to the ground and slid beneath it. The rotten wood of the bench did little to stop the rain, but it hid him from view. Water streamed through the space between the two-by-fours that formed the seat of the bench. He flipped onto his stomach and stared out at the lot in front of the building. A short while later, he saw vague shadows of people moving toward the other side of the building. They were going away from the building, not into it. The synth must have run off. But surely there were more agents than that. He'd only seen a few.

The others would stay behind to kill the rest of them, he guessed. He folded his arms on the ground and rested his head on them. He didn't want to see them. Last time he saw them, at the river, he could have sworn the collar was back around his neck. He could feel the heaviness of it, the pressure of it pressing in on his throat when he ate or spoke or turned his head, and the heat from the explosive block on the side-all unrelenting reminders that he was no longer his own person, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it but be obedient and hope not to invoke the wrath of his captors. The same fate he'd inflicted on countless others. He kept dreaming about it-over and over again he would snap the collars onto victim after victim with a click that he used to find satisfying, but now only made him feel strangely hollow. No one would help them, just as no one had helped him. That was part of what made being a slaver so easy. No one ever helped slaves, for fear of becoming one themselves.

No one except Lydia. Andy wondered if she and Harris felt the same when they saw him as he did when he thought about the Synth Retention Bureau. He smiled ruefully to the ground. _Definitely not._ They hated him, of course. That was obvious. But they certainly felt no fear for him.

He chanced a glance up at the lot. The rain still pounded on the asphalt. No one else had emerged, but he knew the rest were still there somewhere. _They'll kill everyone inside._ Harris was unconscious, the synth had left, and he...well. He wasn't there either. That left Lydia and the ghoul woman, and the kids they'd found in the building.

_They haven't a chance in the world._

This bothered him more than it should have. He was relatively safe. They probably wouldn't notice him here. He was free, and uninjured. _I'm alright. I'm safe. Stay here. Don't move, and you'll be fine_ , he assured himself.

Then, there they were. More figures emerged from the rain, one of them toting a gun that would have been too large for most people to carry. As he watched, they disappeared from view, cut off by the wall he lay beside. It was quiet for a few moments, and he could just hear hushed talking. He jumped when there was a sudden spray of gunfire at the front of the building.

He thought of the people inside the building. He thought of one of the shots hitting Lydia, the person who had saved his life twice and, in an unlikely twist of fate, had freed him of his collar. Suddenly he felt very anxious.

He found himself crawling out from under the bench. For some reason his sense of self-preservation had abandoned him. He went to the corner of the building and paused. The person on the other side was still shooting. He checked around the corner, then quickly withdrew. They were standing in a row behind the shooter, waiting to enter the building behind him. He would have to wait until Lydia and the others returned fire-if they were still able to. Once someone was incapacitated, he could arm himself with their weapon.

Finally the assault stopped, and it was quiet. He heard them all step slowly forward. He leaned close against the corner of the wall to hear, closing his eyes. When he opened them, a woman stood in front of him. He jumped and made a desperate grab for the gun in her hands. She held it tightly and wrestled him farther back around the corner where they were hidden from sight.

"Idiot," she whispered. "Don't make me kill you." Then Andy saw the collar and recognized her face. She was one of the other slaves they'd been traveling with. The frizzy, gold mass of hair he was used to seeing on her was tied behind her, and flattened by the rain. Her eyes quickly moved over him, enviously taking in his bare neck. "How did you escape?" she demanded. "We all thought you were dead."

Perhaps they did have a chance, after all. "I know someone who can defuse the collars. In there." He nodded to the building. "Help me keep her alive, and she'll remove yours, and everyone else's."

The woman stared at him disbelievingly. There was an explosion that rocked the ground. Andy could hear objects striking the wall from the inside.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," he lied.

"If we revolt, and she doesn't get the collars off, we're all dead."

"That won't happen." There was more gunfire. "If you don't do something now, it'll be too late."

The woman looked at him a moment longer, then turned away and leaned around the corner. She gestured for him to follow, then hurried to the door. Andy quickly took in the scene inside. The car on the pedestal to the right had been reduced to a flaming gnarl of blackened aluminum. There was a slave on the ground near the door, shot in the stomach. The woman picked up his discarded gun and handed it to Andy.

_Finally._ The rush of power he felt just from holding that small thing felt immense after being powerless for so long. He felt a vague tug on his legs as the urge to just take the gun and run got stronger, but again, his sense of self-preservation had disappeared and he seemed to no longer be able to think logically. For some reason, he stayed, following the woman behind the dais.

The one with the automatic gun had been hurled against the counter in the blast, but he was getting up now, unsteadily. Near the counter were two more slaves and and another woman in a uniform. Andy recognized her cascade of scarlet hair. She was the boss, an officer. Elle-was that her name? She walked around the edge of the counter to see behind it, where their opponents surely hid. The two slaves were holding them at gunpoint on the other side.

She looked over them briefly, then said, "We only need one. Kill those two."

"No!" Andy and the woman next to him shouted in unison from behind their flaming barrier. "Don't do it," the woman said. "This is our chance to escape. Kill the android!"

Andy watched as the tense moment unfolded. Elle aimed her weapon in his general direction, then glanced over her shoulder at the slaves, barely moving her head. The slaves looked at each other in puzzlement, stock still. The android watched Elle for direction. For a second, no one moved and everyone watched each other very, very carefully.

Then the officer whipped around and fired at one of the slaves, who had almost enough time to dodge out of the way of the shot. The slave screeched and stumbled to the floor. The other slave fired on the android, who fired on Andy. He ducked out of the way as the weapon charged, moving just in time to watch the streams of plasma shoot over his head. The woman next to him fired back at the synth a few times, and the plasma stopped coming. She ducked as Elle fired back.

For a moment they were both huddled there behind the dais, and neither could see what was going on on the other side. There were scuffling sounds, but no gunshots. Andy slid across the floor to the edge of the circular platform so he could see around. Elle was in a sitting position against the counter, holding the uninjured slave up in front of her. Her gun was propped up against his cheek.

"Lady behind the counter, I want you out here in three seconds, sans weapons. I'm counting. One. Two."

The ghoul-Tulip-stumbled out into view, hands raised.

The redhead looked back and forth over the dais, and her eyes fell on Andy. "I see you, you son of a bitch. Ditch the gun and get out here if you don't want this one dead."

Andy frowned. What did she think he cared about that man? _Ah, but she sees this as an escape attempt, not just me helping Lydia._ He hesitated there, but the frizzy-haired woman glared at him. _Go_ , she mouthed.

Andy looked back at Elle. _She won't want to fight anymore, she just wants to get out. She'll take the hostage and leave us alone. She has too much to lose._ He sniffed and slowly stood. _Fine._ He set his gun down on the edge of the dais where she could see it. As he stepped away from it, he lost some of his nerve. He began to feel a little dizzy as he stared at the woman. She'd been there when they bought him. She'd paced up and down the chain-link fence, appraising the sorry figures locked inside. "That one," she'd said, pointing at him. Did she even remember him?

"Who else is there?" the woman barked. "What about the other one?" She nodded to the other side of the car.

Andy looked behind it, then back at her. "I believe you've killed her," he lied.

She opened her mouth, about to say something else, but then paused. She squinted at him. "It's you." The man she held winced as she pressed the gun harder against him. The plasma streams were most likely burning his face now. "You worthless sack of shit. Do you have any idea how much trouble you've caused?"

_Hm_. _So she does remember._

"People like you are a waste of life." She jerked the man in her grip. "I'm talking to you, too. You can't just leave on a whim whenever you feel like it. You have a place, and that place is working for me. The world doesn't work when people start thinking they're better than they are and they can do whatever they want," she spat. "If all was just and right in the world, you'd be dead and that fucking N5 would be decommissioned right now."

Tulip took a discreet step to the right, and the woman snapped her head to look at her immediately. " _Don't you move._ " She turned back to Andy. "What are you doing back here, anyway? Are you a complete idiot? Anyone who helps that synth is going to end up dead."

"We're going to end up dead anyway," Andy said. "Maybe I'm an idiot, but not enough to believe that you'll just let us go after how much we've learned about you and the Institute."

She stared at him incredulously. "Are you kidding? What do we care about what some Waster 'knows' about us? We're already in contact with the Brotherhood and the Enclave. Who else are you going to tell that could be a threat to us? We want the synth and the Railroad bitch, that's all. Though I'd be happy to see you dead," she added.

Andy glanced suspiciously at Tulip. Had she lied to them? She was looking furtively at the door to the back room, and taking another small step to the right.

" _I said don't move!_ " Elle shouted, glaring at Tulip.

There was a bang, and the woman's head flopped to the side as she went limp. Everyone in the room jumped. The slave she'd been holding fairly quaked in shock for a second or two before he realized he was still alive. Everything was still. Then Andy caught a movement in the doorway at the back of the building. Harris slowly stood and opened the door all the way. He looked steadily left to right, looking around at the destroyed room.

-lll-

Lydia stared at the ceiling, willing it to come into focus. It blurred itself around in a circle. Wouldn't stop moving.

"What have we done?" someone nearby said. "They'll kill us when they find out."

_When they find out,_ Lydia echoed absently, moving her lips around the words. She looked at the counter that rose up above her. The top edge got farther and farther away as she looked at it. _That's not normal. Is it?_

There was some more talking, which she didn't bother to decipher. Then someone appeared over her, looking very far away. He squatted next to her, and Lydia drew back in surprise as he seemed to drop twenty stories in a second. "Oh. Harris," she said. "You're okay."

"Are you injured?"

She shook her head, and her vision swam. "Fine."

More faces appeared above her. "We need stims, now," said a woman with a metal collar and frizzy hair. "Corvin was shot, but he's still alive. Barely."

"The girl is hurt, too," Tulip said from somewhere down near the other end of the counter. There was the sound of something like rock being dragged across the floor.

"The ceiling fell on her," Lydia said, half to herself. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the four stimpaks they had left. The frizzy woman quickly took two and disappeared.

"You need one," Harris said.

"No," Lydia said. "Give them to Tulip."

He reluctantly took them and handed them off to Tulip to give to the girl.

"Ah...that was me that kicked you. Sorry about that," said someone else above her. Lydia redirected her attention to another slave who was looking down at her. "You're okay, aren't you?" He was looking at her in a way that suggested he didn't think she was.

Lydia stared at him blankly. "Wasn't I fighting you?"

"It's alright," said Andy, who stood next to the slave. "The synth and the Bureau officer are dead. Now you can take their collars off, like you did mine, right?"

Lydia stared at them. Andy's smile wavered slightly. "Yes. Of course," she said finally. She tried to get up, but only got as far as propping herself on her elbows. She paused while her head settled. "Help," she said to Harris. He gripped her hands and pulled her smoothly upright. When he let go of her, she nearly fell over backwards again. He quickly reached out again to hold her up.

"She can't defuse a bomb. She can barely stand up," said the slave quietly behind her.

"I can _sit down_ and do it," Lydia pointed out indignantly, rolling her eyes at the obviousness of this fact.

"No," Andy said, a shadow coming over his features. "There's something wrong with you."

The frizzy-haired slave was back now, with another one next to her. There was a hole in the middle of his blood-stained uniform. "What's wrong with her?" the woman asked.

She didn't hear the rest of their interaction, because then Harris started talking to her.

"Lydia," he said, and she looked up at him. "You were hit in the head."

"...Yeah."

"It's worse than you think."

"No, it's..." She stopped. It definitely wasn't normal to not be able to stand without help.

"How bad is it?" he asked her.

She paused. "A concussion," she said after a moment. "Not too bad. I didn't get knocked out. Uh...did I?" She reached to her pocket for a stimpak, only to discover that they were gone. She wondered what had happened to them.

"Fantastic," said the slave woman behind her. "Did you have to hit her like that?"

"Well, I'm sorry. I didn't know we'd be switching sides halfway through the fight."

"She'll be better soon, won't she? We'll just have to wait," someone else said.

"Who knows how long that will take?" replied the woman. "We don't have forever to wait around for her to get back to her senses; The rest of the Bureau agents will be back to get us before long."

"I'll do it," Harris said. Lydia looked up at him with raised eyebrows.

"Do what?" the woman asked.

"I'll remove your collars."

The woman looked at him sidelong. "You know how, too?"

"I've watched her do it."

"Have you done it?"

"No."

She sighed. " _Fantastic_."

"Don't you know how?" Harris asked Andy.

"Me? No. I saw someone taking one off, when I was...in Paradise Falls," he said carefully. Harris just glared silently at him. Lydia couldn't blame him for not wanting to announce his previous profession to a room full of slaves. "They have a different way of doing it there, when the explosive has already been deactivated. All I know is that the red wire connects to the bomb and the yellow one unlocks the collar."

The woman turned and covered her face with her hands, muttering curses. The man next to Andy spoke to Harris. "Hey, you already saved my ass once. I was sure that lady was going to kill me. If you're willing to try to get this thing off, I'm willing to let you. If we spend much more time with them, we'll be dead anyway."

Harris nodded. "I'll be right back." He turned Lydia toward the back room, and she trudged slowly forward, leaning on him. It was unusually difficult to move. After she stumbled for the second time, he just bent down, hooked his arms under her knees and back, and carried her the rest of the way. Lydia stayed very still, unsure what to do with herself. She could feel her face heating up. She glanced up at Harris, but looked away when their eyes met. He quickly set her back on her feet inside the room, and she leaned unsteadily against the wall.

The boy was still in the room, wedged in a corner. He looked up at them nervously. Then his sister came in, and he immediately leapt on her, holding his arms up eagerly. She picked him up and held him on her side. As she turned back to the door, she came face to face with Harris. She paused, eyeing the right side of his head where she'd shot him. She stood there for a moment, as if deciding what to say to him. In the end, she just fixed him with a quick glare and left.

Harris seemed to find this form of interaction acceptable, and similarly ignored her. He got the wire cutters and screwdriver that, as it happened, Lydia had insisted on bringing for this exact purpose. "Can I have your pin?" he asked.

Lydia took a bobby pin from her hair and handed to him. "I should help you," she said. "In case you don't know what to do."

"I don't think so."

Movement outside caught Lydia's eye, and she looked out the door. She pointed curiously at the slave next to Andy. "Wasn't I fighting him?"

"I think you should sleep."

That _did_ sound nice. Her head hurt. She slid down the wall, almost tipping to the side. Harris didn't move to help her this time, but stood a careful distance away.

She rested her head on the pack on the floor. "Don't let the door open too much," she said. "And, don't let the thing come up. Keep the pin on it."

"I know," Harris said.

"And...don't forget, cut the red wire first."

"Lydia, I don't think I'll forget that for as long as I live."

She nodded vacantly. "Be careful," she said as Harris closed the door behind him.

-lll-

Cold. It was cold. Lydia's feet were numb. She pulled her knees up to her chest, and held her blanket closer around her. Then she warily opened her eyes as she realized she didn't remember where she was or how she'd gotten there. Which wouldn't have worried her too much (that happened occasionally), but her memory was blanker than usual. She recognized the room, but she didn't remember having gone to sleep in it.

Her apprehension was allayed when she looked up and saw Harris sitting next to her. Tulip sat on the desk, tapping one foot and picking at a fingernail. Andy sat cross-legged, completely still, against the opposite wall. His skin was red and obviously severely irritated from the rain. Lydia sat up, making her head throb.

"Back among the living, huh?" Tulip said.

"I guess so." The kids were nowhere to be seen. _And the slaves...there were slaves earlier, too._ "Where is everyone?"

"Gone. The slaves wanted to get out of here as soon as their collars were off. And that girl didn't want to spend any more time with us either, as you can probably imagine. Too bad. That little boy was adorable," she said wistfully. "I wish they'd stayed."

Lydia remembered then. Harris had volunteered to remove their collars. She looked up at him again to make sure he was in one piece. He didn't have so much as a burn mark on him.

She could still hear the rain hitting the ceiling. "They went out into the rain?"

Tulip nodded. "Can you blame them?"

Lydia carefully stood and opened the door. The storm had lost considerable strength since she'd last looked outside. "Shouldn't we go, too?"

"No. I think it will stop soon," Harris said. "And I don't think they'll be back for a while if they're chasing Max."

"Good." She was already cold enough. She pulled off her sweater, which was still damp from earlier, and flattened it on the ground to dry. The T-shirt she wore underneath it was still mostly dry. Clutching her blanket around her, she went outside into the larger room. The fight had left the room in tatters, and the walls that still stood were spattered with blood and plasma. Only one body was left, slumped against the counter and staring ahead with empty eyes. It was holding a weapon large enough that Lydia couldn't lift it. She shoved it to the side so she could take out the energy cells.

It had blood, unlike the other android they'd killed, but through the holes that plasma had burned in its head and torso, Lydia could see wires and shiny metal components. She edged warily toward it, half expecting it to suddenly come back to life. She reached out and touched the bullet wound on its forehead. Behind a thin layer of skin was a metal skull. She paused to unclip her flashlight from her waist, then pointed the light at the wound.

Through the small hole she could just see a puzzling mix of organic and inorganic matter. Drenched in a mix of blood and plasma was a nest of wires, tiny tubes, and delicate metal shards half melted by the plasma. She wondered if that was what Max looked like on the inside.

She clicked off the light and stood up. As an afterthought, she reached down again to shut the android's eyes. She abandoned the synth to sit behind what was left of the door. She had a clear view to the outside from below, where the lower half of the wall was gone. Rain fell much more quietly now. It was like a translucent, fluttering curtain over the landscape.

She stared at it for a long time, watching the way it shimmered and moved. Droplets created small showers of mud as they hit the ground. Ripples disrupted the surfaces of puddles and rivers that had formed on the ground. She'd been sitting there for a while when she heard the scrape of someone's foot behind her. She looked back, and Harris was standing outside the back room with an annoyed look on his face.

"What's wrong?"

"That woman." He nodded to the end of the counter. "Should be right there. None of us moved her body."

Lydia searched her memory. A vague recollection came to mind: someone on the other side of the counter, doing an awful lot of talking. The voice had been familiar. "Elle. She's dead?"

"So we thought."

"Oh." There were large spots of blood on the floor where she had been. Now that Lydia looked more closely, she could follow a trail of it from the counter all the way to the door. Beyond the threshold the trail was lost, washed away in the rain. "How long was I asleep?"

"A couple hours." He went and stood next to her, bending down to look outside. It was dark out now. An orange light out in the parking lot, diffused by the water in the air, shone down on the cars.

"It's beautiful." She looked up at him when he didn't reply.

He sat down next to her. "I suppose. I never thought about it."

She stared out at the rain, mesmerized, for a long time, breathing in the thick vapor in the air. Neither of them interrupted the sound of the drumming on the ground and the ceiling.

There was a loud, deep rumbling noise that sounded not quite like an explosion.

"Was that thunder?" Lydia asked.

"Yes."

She smiled. The rainfall was beginning to wane. Soon it slowed and quieted. After a few minutes, it stopped altogether. As she watched, the heavy clouds drifted away and left only thin wisps of themselves behind.

"I don't know if you remember, but that woman spoke a lot before I shot her," Harris said.

"What did she say?"

"She said they only want Max and Tulip."

She looked at him. "What?"

"I think Max knew that."

"You think he lied about them wanting us, too?'

"Yes."

"He can't lie."

"He _said_ he can't lie."

Lydia thought. "He did it to protect Tulip," she realized. "She was an operator. What do you want to bet he can lie if it's to protect her?"

Harris nodded slowly in agreement.

_Whatever that robot's head looks like on the inside, it sure is a tangled labyrinth of technicalities to sort out from the outside._ Somehow she was much less annoyed at this divulgence of information than she thought she should be. No doubt if this had happened a week earlier, she'd have been outraged. "We can't leave Tulip alone."

"No," he agreed, and there was no further discussion about it. Harris got to his feet. Lydia followed. They had a ways to go before they got to the intersection where they would meet Max.


	13. Chapter 13

Though Harris said the highway was the shortest route to where they were going, they didn't follow it. They turned off on the second exit they came across so they wouldn't cross paths with the Synth Retention Bureau agents again. They were entering a city when the ground started to shake.

The small vibration didn't worry Lydia. It was some distant explosion. She'd felt them often. But then there was another one, and another, and another, a rhythmic pattern of earthquakes. The others seemed to notice, too, and everyone slowed. The central strip that they were on was lined with brick buildings of varying height. As they watched, an enormous muscle-bound figure emerged from an alley, dragging what looked like a human body behind it. Another one walked out behind it, scratching its head with a mailbox it held by the end of its splintered post.

"No one make any sudden moves," Harris said quietly but clearly. He slowly moved to a crouch, and everyone followed suit. As they paused, deciding where to move next, Lydia caught more movement behind them. She turned to see another mutant lumbering behind them, crossing to the other side of the street.

"There's more," she whispered. "Behind us." They all looked back, and Lydia noted yet another one waiting on the other side of the street. She moved carefully to their own side of the street, down the alley closest to them, and the others followed. They edged down the alley, pressed against the wall, and stopped abruptly when there came more shaking that seemed to originate from the other end of the alley, getting closer and stronger. They all ducked behind a dumpster as a super mutant trudged down the sidewalk past the alley.

They all squished closer together as Andy, being the last in the line and farthest away from the dumpster, attempted to move closer to it. Tulip elbowed him roughly. "Cut it out," she whispered.

"Move down more, they're going to see me."

"I'm moved down as far as I can go!"

"Shh!"

The mutant's steps faltered. It made a confused noise. "HUMANS..." it muttered. "MORE HUMANS."

Harris made a small, exasperated sound as he pulled his rifle from his shoulder and held it up, ready to shoot. Lydia took out her own gun as the shaking worsened. She watched the mutant's shadow move along the wall, and she raised her pistol.

A bald, green head emerged from the other side of the dumpster, and there was an enormous din as everyone fired at once before it had a chance to see them. The monster stumbled backwards, and there was a crunch as it hit the wall behind it, leaving a large mutant-shaped dent in the crumbling bricks.

They didn't wait for the other mutants to follow the sound of the gunshots. All of them leapt to their feet and darted to the other end of the alley. It opened onto another business-lined street, and more mutants were at the end it. They stood around a pile of a lot of something that was red and brown and attracting a small cloud of flies. They'd turned in confusion in their direction, and now were starting toward them. Harris knelt down to brace his arms on his knee and shot at the foremost of the group.

"Hey," came a voice from behind Lydia. She looked around at the buildings behind them, but she could see no one in any of the windows or doorways.

"Down here."

She looked down. There was a grate in the sidewalk just to the side of her feet. In the tunnel beneath it stood a ghoul with a shotgun propped against his shoulder.

"You?" he said in surprise as she turned toward him. It took Lydia a moment to recognize him. It was Joseph. But after a moment he shook his head and pointed to his right, away from the super mutants. "Two blocks down there's an entrance to the subway tunnels. It's a stairwell in the sidewalk. I'll open the door for you. Hurry up." He disappeared down the tunnel.

Andy and Tulip were shooting next to Harris. Two of the super mutants lay dead in the street. As she watched, the last one joined them.

There was a violent pounding sound and the ground shook again. Lydia whipped around and shot the mutant that was barreling through the alley behind them. It fairly ignored her lasers, but it stumbled when Harris's 5.56mm bullets hit its leg. Lydia backpedaled away from the mutant as she shot it again. "We need to get to the metro entrance," she said loudly over the gunfire. "That way." The mutant collapsed with a thunderous sound, but there were more behind it.

They turned and sprinted down the street in the direction Joseph had indicated. Lydia could hear the mutants behind them-they weren't very agile, but once they got going, they could move fast. She could hear and feel them gaining on them. Harris was running beside her, but suddenly he stopped and turned to fire on the mutants. There was a massive roar of annoyance behind them. Lydia paused to look back. He was shooting at their legs and feet.

"Harris," she shouted at him.

"I'm coming. Go." The mutants were frighteningly close to him. He'd crippled two of them enough that they wouldn't be able to keep up with them. Lydia shot another one as it raised a fist above Harris. It shook its head and rubbed at the spot where she'd shot it. It was enough time for Harris to turn and finish it off, shooting up underneath its chin. Its head was knocked back as bullets exploded out of the top of its skull. He turned and took off the other way, nearly running into Lydia.

Tulip and Andy had stopped again to shoot at the mutants that were coming up behind Harris and Lydia. They turned as the latter group caught up, and as they entered the next street, another mutant ran out into their path. It skidded to a halt in surprise when it saw them, but not before they'd all ducked around it. Lydia heard a sound that she was willing to bet was the mutants behind them running into the new one. There was a great deal of thumping around and extremely loud shouting for a few moments as they reorganized themselves.

They cut down an alleyway back to the street they'd come in on. The mutants, who couldn't all fit through the thin alley, jostled and fought for position as they worked their way down it.

They were met with another incoming mutant at the other end of the alley, and Lydia dove out of the way just in time to avoid a swing from a sledgehammer. It slammed into the ground inches from her foot, and the asphalt below it buckled and cracked. No stimpak would heal the damage done by something like that. Harris pulled her to her feet, away from another crushing blow.

They turned into the next alley and circled back the way they'd come, confusing the green brutes enough to throw them off their trail momentarily. They ran down the sidewalk to the edge of the block, and Lydia could see the dark rectangle in the sidewalk ahead where a flight of stairs descended below ground. They all swung around the railing and took the stairs three at a time. There was a door behind a gate at the bottom. Tulip, at the front of the group, shoved at the rusted chain-link. It creaked, but didn't open. A heavy chain and padlock held it shut.

Harris pushed his way to the front of the group and dealt with the lock the same way he had at the previous building they'd broken into. He pulled the bullet-ridden padlock away and thrust open the gate. He pushed on the door to the subway-to no effect. It budged a small amount as he shoved at it, but stopped after opening only a few inches.

"Something's blocking it," he said, ramming it again.

"He said he'd open it," Lydia said.

"Who?"

The ground shook violently, and Lydia looked up the stairs. Several mutants towered above them. They seemed too big to fit down the narrow staircase. She raised her gun at the closest of them and fired. She flinched in surprise as a red ray streamed out at an odd angle, nowhere near where she'd been aiming. Something was wrong with her gun. The mutants returned the attack, swiping downward with a variety of poles and boards.

She ducked out of the way to let Andy and Tulip shoot, instead pushing against the door with Harris. She could feel it inching open, slowly. Too slow. The mutants at the top of the stairs looked up at something behind them, then backed away. _Uh-oh._

Another super mutant stepped forward, a gatling gun hanging from its hands. As Lydia watched, the gun whined as it powered up, the barrel glowing brighter and brighter.

The door suddenly opened, and they fell inside. Tulip and Andy hurried through the opening behind them, and Lydia saw Joseph shut the door and leap aside just as a barrage of lasers assaulted the door. In a matter of seconds, the lasers had eaten through the door and were hitting the wall beyond it. Whatever it was that had been blocking the door disintegrated shortly.

"Come on, this way," Joseph said loudly. He hurried away from the lasers, through a door and down a familiar type of passage. It was identical to the others Lydia had spent so much time in near the Museum.

He slowed as soon as they were out of the first room. "Don't worry," he said. "They're too big to fit down here, and they're too stupid to find another entrance. They'll probably forget we were even here in a little while."

"Thanks for the help," Tulip said. "There were so many of them..."

"No problem," he said blandly. He stopped in the next room and turned to look at all of them. "Everyone okay?"

"Think so," Tulip said, glancing over at the others. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She wasn't the only one who was shaken; Lydia's heart still pounded. But Tulip wasn't used to this. She didn't leave Underworld often. Lydia wondered if she'd known what she was getting into when she'd insisted on going with Max.

Joseph turned to Andy, who was standing at the back of the group, looking suspiciously back behind them. "Who are you?"

"Me?" He turned forward. "I'm with them."

Joseph gave him a scrutinizing look.

"That's Andy," Lydia clarified. "You might remember him from before, in Underworld. He was there when we were leaving."

"Oh. Yeah." He looked confused, but looked either too tired or too disinterested to question her further. "Well...there's a spot up ahead that had some raiders and roaches in it, but I cleared it out, and there's a fire. So, you're welcome to it, I guess."

"We have to get going," Harris started, but Tulip talked loudly over him.

"Fire sounds great! I'd love to stay."

Joseph shrugged. "Yeah, okay," he said, looking slightly disappointed. "This way." He led them down another tunnel, then another, and around the next corner Lydia could see an orange glow on the walls.

"We need to sleep anyway," Lydia said to Harris. "This place looks as good as any. Better, even."

"I suppose."

The room he'd cleared out was smallish, but more than large enough to fit all of them. There was indeed a fire on the floor in the center of it. Smoke trailed up through a small grate in the ceiling above it.

Tulip immediately went to sit next to the pile of burning lumber, closer than Lydia would have been comfortable with. "So," she said as the others sat down. "What are you doing all the way out here, Joseph?"

"I'm going to the Med-Tek plant. Quinn was going in the opposite direction, and I didn't have much to pay him with, so I decided to come myself."

"He would have done it for you anyway," Tulip told him.

Joseph shook his head. "I didn't want him to do that. I can handle it myself." He glanced at Lydia, then looked away. "...I asked the Doc about, you know, trying anti-depressants, like you said," he said hesitantly. "He said it was a good idea. So that's what I'm looking for."

"Oh," Lydia said. "Good."

There was a short, awkward silence. Tulip quickly filled it, asking about how his journey had been so far. Lydia was soon tuning out the conversation, turning to examine her gun instead. She didn't want to fire it again inside the room in case it did something unpredictable.

"Can I show you this?" Lydia asked Harris, getting up. He followed her as she went back into the tunnel and down a short ways, to the end of the tracks.

Lydia sniffed at a rank odor. "Guess we know where he put the raiders," she muttered. Off at the end of the tunnel sat two corpses, one missing the majority of his head, the other with a large hole in the middle of his chest.

She held out her gun to Harris. "Here. Try it."

He took the offered gun and aimed at the far wall. As he fired, it again shot about twenty degrees to the left of where he'd been aiming. The beam looked different than usual. It seemed wider, and less bright.

"I'm used to having to correct my aim a bit for different weapons, but that's a little ridiculous, don't you think?" Lydia said.

Harris brought the gun down and held his hand in front of the barrel. Lydia gasped as he pulled the trigger again, but he held his palm up to show it to her-uninjured. "Your focusing array is damaged," he reported.

"Can it be fixed?"

"Maybe." He sat down, taking his screwdriver from his pocket, and took out the screws on one side of the gun. Setting the screws aside, he took off the entire right side of the gun, which turned out to simply be a panel to cover the insides. Lydia clicked on her flashlight and shone it inside. The exposed mechanisms were a mystery. It looked nothing like a normal gun. There didn't appear to be anything wrong with it, but then, she didn't know how it was usually supposed to look.

Harris held the open side up closer to the light. After a moment he pointed to several of a series of tiny lenses. "Right there. These three have been knocked to the side, and this one's bent."

"It hit the ground when I fell earlier."

"That would do it, if it hit hard enough."

"Can we fix it?"

"Maybe. It's nearly impossible to get the lenses aligned exactly right. Max could probably do it. And you'll have to get a replacement for the bent lens."

"Oh." She couldn't wait until they found Max again (if he was even still alive or there to be found). She needed a usable weapon now. She knew Harris would let her borrow one of his, but she'd rather liked the laser pistol. Not to mention that there was something she just enjoyed about having her own things. It came from growing up in a vault, no doubt. When she'd left, she'd been mystified by the idea that you could claim ownership of just about anything you picked up.

She shined the flashlight at the end of the tracks. The raider closest to her had a revolver on each hip. _Not very practical._ She moved the light over the next body. Draped over an arm above him was a long, boxy gun like Willow's. There was a cloth strap holding it over the shoulder of the dead raider.

Lydia went and pulled it off, careful to avoid the gory mess of a head left on the body. She picked it up by the end of the handle with one hand, trying not to touch the congealed blood that clung to one side. It was heavier than it looked, and balanced oddly, so it swung down and brushed her side with blood despite the care she took in holding it. She sighed, and wiped the side of the gun on the raider's jeans. When it was mostly cleaned off, she held it up and aimed it at the wall. Her hand stuck to the trigger. _It's just blood. Just blood._ She'd never been the least bit queasy the few times she'd done operations in the vault, but it was different when the source of the blood was lying dead on the ground a few feet away.

She fired at the wall, and a beam shot out straight and strong, back to the brightness and density she was used to. _Better_ than she was used to, even. There was a crack as it hit the concrete and broke a chunk away. It seemed to be in correct working order.

She went and sat back down beside Harris, away from the bodies. She picked up the screwdriver he had used to take the panel off the pistol, and was turning one of the screws on the rifle when it occurred to her that she didn't have to repair the pistol.

"What if I started using this instead?" She asked Harris, indicating the rifle.

He nodded in approval. "If you think you can handle the weight. It will have more power than your pistol, and better accuracy."

"I can handle it," Lydia assured him. She lifted the oblong mass of metal, fitting the end against her shoulder and looking down the sights. It was a little unwieldy, being much heavier towards the far end and having a tendency to tip down in that direction. She had to reach far down the stock to hold it up straight, but she managed it.

She shot at specks on the wall, practicing. She was delighted by the shower of crumbling concrete made with each shot. It was indeed much more effective than her pistol. This was by far the most destructive weapon she'd ever used. _Now I just need a raider to shoot at,_ she thought, and she stopped. When had she become so violent?

She set the rifle down next to her and pushed it away a bit. Her hands were tacky with half-dried blood. She rubbed them on her pants. She was becoming more desensitized to violence. Encounters with wild animals or raiders were no longer so terrifying that they rendered her unable to move. Corpses were disturbing, but didn't give her the urge to retch when she saw them. She was already aware of all this. But looking forward to opportunities to hurt people? That was something new.

"Do you like fighting?" she asked Harris.

"Does it matter? I'm going to keep doing it, whether I like it or not."

"I was just wondering."

"I wouldn't choose to, if I didn't have to."

Lydia nodded uncertainly. She reached for the rifle again, asking him for a spare rag, which he handed her. She wiped at the dark streaks on the metal. The red ooze stuck in corners and inside the heads of screws. Mostly it just smeared around and wouldn't come off.

_I wonder if other people have this happen to them? Maybe everyone starts out with an aversion to murder. Maybe it's something that people learn to accept as a necessity in the Wastes._

She suddenly felt like she'd just learned there was no Santa Claus. She stared at the blood-smeared weapon in her arms.

"Harris," she said, "can I ask you about when you were with Talon Company?"

"If you want." He said nothing more, and Lydia realized he was waiting for a more specific question.

"Well...what was it like?"

He raised his eyebrows slightly. "I didn't like it very much."

"How did you come to join up with them?"

"I came across a group of them in the Wastes. I didn't have much other choice."

Lydia stared at him. He really didn't seem to understand how this whole 'conversation' thing worked. "What do you mean?" she finally asked.

He waited a moment, apparently figuring out what he wanted to say.

"It was a couple years after my mother died," he said. "When I was 15. I was out scavenging-not that far from the house, I hadn't ventured very far away from it by then. And I ran into them. About six of them." He spoke slower than usual, almost falteringly. Lydia watched him quietly.

"They were bored, I suppose, so they took my gun and made me fight one of them. I did better than they thought I would, apparently. I ended up knocking out the kid I fought with, so they asked me to take his place." He cleared his throat. "Not that they were really asking."

"They made you?"

"If I declined the invitation they most likely would have just killed me and looted my body. Probably would have left the other kid there, too. Actually, I think they planned to kill me anyway, after they got bored of having me around, but after a few jobs they realized I was a good shot and would probably be more useful if they kept me alive."

"Oh," Lydia said. She'd hardly blinked. She didn't want to miss a word he said. "How did you get out of it?"

"A few months later we were hired to kill someone in the capital. We'd been following him for a few days when we caught up to him at the Mall. He saw us and ran before we were close enough to get a shot at him. We chased him down the street until he ran inside the Museum of History. Willow stopped us when we got to the doors. There was a bit of a standoff for a while. If I knew back then what it was actually like in there, I would have just run in and grabbed the guy right then." He gave her a small smile. "But...ghouls were much more frightening before I became one."

Lydia smiled back. "Too many zombie movies?"

"Something like that. Anyway, we lingered there for too long, and it gave them enough time to get Cerberus and Quinn up to the front doors. It was a massacre. Someone shot me. Willow, I think. The next thing I knew, all the other mercs were on the ground around me.

"By then I was starting to show signs of becoming a ghoul, and Willow noticed. I think that was why she didn't finish me off." He shrugged. "I still haven't really figured that one out. If I was her, I would have killed me. But they took me into the Chop Shop instead. They didn't stim me. I had to heal the slow way. In case I got the urge to go on a murderous rampage or something, I guess." He sniffed. "So, I've been doing this since then."

"Wow," Lydia said.

Harris arched an eyebrow at her.

"Who was the guy you were chasing?"

"Some guy. He was gone before I got out of the Chop Shop. I never saw him again. Can't even remember what he looked like. We had a lot of jobs like that. People would hire us to...kill someone they wanted dead." He sniffed again, and reached absentmindedly for his left jacket pocket, where he kept his box of cigarettes. He paused as he was reaching inside, and pulled his hand back out without taking anything. "We escorted people or caravans, sometimes. One time we were hired to help defend a settlement from raiders."

"That's not so bad," Lydia said quickly, and immediately felt stupid. She closed her lips tightly.

"Sometimes we did things like that. Or we'd be hired to guard stores for a period of time. But mostly it was killing people."

"Why?" Lydia asked.

He paused, and Lydia thought he was going to tell her that they'd talked enough, but he continued. "A lot of reasons. By hiring us, there's no personal risk of harm for them, and they don't have to worry about getting in trouble with regulators or vigilantes. Sometimes they felt they'd been wronged by the target for some reason-they'd stolen something from them or something like that. Most of the time that wasn't it, or they'd go to someone more reputable for help instead of us. One time someone wanted us to take care of the owner of a shop down the street from him, to eliminate competition. Another time a man hired us to kill his wife because he thought she'd been cheating on him."

" _Thought_ she'd been cheating?" Lydia asked. She kept thinking he was going to tell her to mind her own business. She'd never heard him talk for this long before. He kept going, as though propelled forward by the momentum of everything he'd said already. "You think he was wrong?"

"I don't know." Harris stared down at the ground. "The woman was a doctor. When we caught up to her, she was with the guy she'd supposedly been cheating with, one of her patients. The guy had a broken foot or something, and she was looking at it. If they were doing something more than that, they weren't doing it when I showed up. But it didn't matter. I was payed to kill them, not figure out whether they deserved it or not."

" _'I_ was payed' ?"

"...Yes," he admitted, still staring at the floor. "We weren't expecting them to be armed, so I was sent by myself. They figured I could handle it alone. And I could. They recognized the armor as soon as I came in, and the man reached for his gun but I shot him before he could get to it. The woman...she just got down on her knees and begged for her life. She didn't even try to fight. She wouldn't stop crying."

Lydia watched a muscle in his temple twitch as he ground his teeth. "So I shot her," he said, and shrugged, stiffly, staring hard at the floor. "It was the easiest job I ever had with Talon Company." He sat completely motionless.

Lydia studied him. She suddenly remembered the rifle on her lap, and she set it down next to her again. She sat silently. She'd asked too much. It was none of her business. She glanced up at him, and he was a statue. His face was completely neutral. It was beginning to scare her. She didn't know what to do - she knew there was nothing she could say that would make him feel any better. She just leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. The fabric of his jacket smelled like him-dust, tobacco, and the recent rain.

Finally he moved, leaning back against the wall. He exhaled heavily, and there was another rush of the cigarettes he smoked. Lydia closed her eyes.

She felt him turn slightly, toward her. He reached over her stomach with one arm, and Lydia thought he was reaching for the rifle next to her, but then his fingers curled around her arm. He pulled her closer to him.

Lydia opened her eyes and looked up at him in surprise. He froze. Then he quickly pulled away from her, as though she were hot to the touch. He stood and looked down at her with an expression that looked almost as bewildered as she felt.

"I'm sorry."

Lydia blinked back at him.

For a moment he looked as though he would say something more. Instead, he turned and strode down the tunnel back toward the fire. Lydia stared after him. She sat back against the wall, absently picked up the laser rifle, and continued to rub at the blood with the cloth.


	14. Chapter 14

Tulip, Andy, Harris, and Lydia awoke the next morning in the dark of the underground. They walked down the tracks for a long time, and by the time they emerged at a station far up the subway line, the sun was nearly halfway across the sky. It scorched Lydia's eyes, and she put her hand up to her brow, wishing she had a pair of sunglasses. At the same time, a cold breeze blew her hair in front of her face and chilled her. _The worst of both worlds._ A wave of dust blew across the street. The compacting effect the rain had had on the soil was already gone.

She could see the highway not far off, beyond a row of ramshackle houses that lined either side of the street: a ghost town. They were about halfway down the road to the on-ramp when a man stepped out into the street, casually moving into their path. He held a submachine gun at his side.

The group paused when several more people converged onto the street in front of them, coming out from behind the houses. Lydia reached behind her to pull her rifle down, but stopped when she heard someone loudly cocking a gun behind her. She turned to see more people behind them, emerging from houses and backyards, all carrying weapons. It was an odd assortment of people. There were men and women. Some of them were elderly. Some were even children. Lydia dropped her hand slowly to her side.

The man in front of them regarded them briefly, twitching his mustache back and forth with a sniff. "Where you folks going?" It seemed to be directed at Andy, for some reason.

"We're just passing through," Tulip said, her rough voice standing out in comparison to the other man's.

"I weren't asking you," the man said. "You be quiet, and just count yourself lucky you got somebody human with you, 'cause we usually just shoot zombies when we see 'em."

Tulip glared at him, and looked to be torn between anger and fear. The latter won over, and she shrank in on herself slightly, glancing anxiously at the other gunmen around them.

The mustached man turned to Andy again. " 'Less you don't mind." He chuckled.

"Oh, ah...no, no, I mind," Andy replied. "And, we are just passing through," he confirmed. "We don't want trouble."

The man shrugged. "Well, you won't get no trouble. Only thing is, there's a toll through here."

"A toll."

"Yeah. Just been raised up to 100 caps. But I bet you can afford it." He wiggled his mustache again.

" _A hundred_ -" Tulip started in outrage, but quickly cut herself off.

The man gave her a sharp look. "A hundred and fifty, that is. You can give it over..." he fondled the machine gun he held. "...or not."

Andy glanced over at the rest of them questioningly. Harris shrugged off his backpack, and the man in front of them raised his gun in a flash in response to the movement. There was a sound of movement and weapons being cocked all around them as the others followed the mustached man's example.

"Our money's in there," Andy said quickly. "He'll get it out, alright?"

The man nodded, and he moved over behind Harris, keeping his gun on him. He poked him in the back with the muzzle, just to make sure his threat was beyond loud and clear. Harris slowly bent down to the pack and reached down to the bottom. After a moment he pulled out a bag and tossed it on the ground in front of him. The sound of caps clinking together could clearly be heard inside. A woman came and picked it up, then quickly retreated.

"Thank you kindly," said the man in charge, taking a step back as Harris straightened warily. He gave them one last sniff and wiggle of his mustache, and gestured forward down the road. "Go on, now. You have a nice day, you hear?"

Harris pulled his pack back on, and they hurried out of the town. Lydia glanced back behind them once, and none of the people had moved. The mustached man raised his gun hand to his forehead and saluted with it.

Tulip glowered the rest of the way to the highway. "Assholes," she muttered, when they were well out of earshot (and eyeshot) of the people behind them. Lydia had similar sentiments, though she didn't voice them. "And you don't have to look so smug," Tulip said to Andy.

"I'm not being smug," he said smugly.

Tulip muttered something about humans and gradually wandered off by herself to the side of the group.

Andy was quiet for a while. It was only after the group had dispersed more that he caught Lydia's eye and smiled. It was more of a smirk, as usual. She raised an eyebrow. He came over and walked next to her. She felt herself leaning minimally away from him.

"Shouldn't you have left by now?" she asked without looking up. "You've got your gun. You've got no excuse now."

He was quiet for a minute. "I wanted to talk to you," he said.

"Why?"

Harris turned at the sound of their voices, glancing over them. Andy stiffened, but the ghoul turned back around without saying anything.

Lydia looked up at Andy. He smiled again, less confidently. "I don't understand you," he said, "and I want to."

"Go away."

His face fell a fraction. "It's just an honest question." When Lydia didn't answer, he reached up absently and scratched the scar on his neck.

"You want to know why you're not dead?" Lydia asked. She pointed to the scar. "From that?"

Andy looked at her quietly.

"You don't understand, because you never would have done what I did," Lydia continued.

"No," he admitted. "I wouldn't have, were I you."

"That," Lydia said, "is exactly the reason I did it."

-lll-

It was almost noon when there was a flash from the camera bulb in the window of the house closest to the metro station. At the signal, everyone on watch picked up their weapons and moved into position in the alleys between their houses, excited at having someone else wander through so soon. There was only a solitary man this time: a Talon Company mercenary, by his armor. He walked slowly and scanned all around. It wouldn't help him. He wouldn't see them until it was too late.

The mustached man walked out first, straight into the mercenary's path. The mercenary slowed and gave the man a curious look. His hand moved subtly to the submachine gun at his hip, and the mustached man quickly raised his in return. "None of that, friend."

The mercenary stopped, lowering his arm. He lifted his sunglasses and looked behind him. By that time the others had moved in behind him and on each side, surrounding him. He turned back to the man blocking his path. "What's this about, then, 'friend'?"

"This is about the toll." He looked the mercenary up and down. "For a working man like you, 150 caps. Nothing too much."

"I don't know about that. What if I don't have 150 caps?"

"Oh, we accept lots of things other than caps," said the mustached man charitably. He sniffed. "Like that there gun you have, that might work..."

"What about blood? You accept that?"

The man frowned. "What the hell's that supposed to-" Then he looked past the mercenary and saw the other two men that had come up behind the people in back, both wearing the same armor as the one that stood before him. They'd each wrapped an arm around the neck of their hostage and held a gun at the back of their head. One of the victims was a woman, the other just a girl, no older than twelve.

"No," he said, lip twitching compulsively. "No blood."

"I thought not," said the first mercenary, slowly drawing his gun. He waved it to the side. "Move."

The mustached man stood his ground. His eyes darted between the three mercenaries. "You'll kill them even if we let you by. Better to shoot you now."

"If you shoot at us, we'll definitely kill them, and probably more of you, too." He shrugged. "But if you don't, maybe we'll let them live. You never know."

The mustached man glared at him. He looked at the hostages at the back of the group, then back at the man in front of him. The corner of the mercenary's mouth was quirked upward in half a smile, but his eyes remained hidden behind his reflective glasses.

The other toll collectors looked anxiously to their leader, willing him to move aside. The ones next to him murmured this wish to him out of the corners of their mouths, and he waved them away, finally stepping to the side to allow the mercenaries to pass.

"Just one more thing," said the first mercenary. "We have a toll of our own."

The man twitched furiously. He took his recently obtained bag of caps out of his pocket and threw it to the ground in front of him.

The mercenary nodded to him in thanks as he picked up the bag. They turned and walked backwards down the road, staying low behind their hostages. No one followed them. When they were almost too far away to still see the people in front of the metro station, the one with sunglasses called a halt.

They finally let go of the hostages. The woman leapt away as soon as the pressure on her neck was released, and stepped backwards cautiously.

"Stay still," said the one with sunglasses casually, as though he were going to pick a bug off her shirt. He raised his gun. There was a split second when the woman realized that she was going to die just before it happened, and an indescribable look came over her face. It was not a look he was unfamiliar with. He fired several rounds into her head.

The girl screamed as the woman went limp and fell to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She looked helplessly up at the armored men with watering eyes.

The mercenary lowered his gun and jerked his head toward the town. "Go," he said to the girl.

She leapt up and ran.

The man adjusted his sunglasses and turned to start down the highway in the other direction. The others followed. The woman behind them lay motionless in a slowly widening pool of blood.

-lll-

They had plenty of forewarning before they crossed route 267. The upcoming exit was advertised by large green signs on the side of the road and attached to metal frames hanging above it. It was getting dark as they came to the off ramp that led to the intersecting highway. They walked down the road a ways, until they made it to 267. Max had been nowhere along the length of it.

They stopped and stood amid the rusted cars that occasionally dotted the lanes of the cracked and buckling road. No one said anything. No one wanted to admit the obvious conclusion that had come to all of them-that Max wasn't here. He hadn't made it. Either he was dead, or he'd been captured by the Synth Retention Bureau.

"He must still be on his way," Tulip said quietly. No one responded. "We should wait for him."

"If he doesn't sleep then he should have arrived here long before us, even if he took a longer route," Harris said.

Tulip crossed her arms and continued to look around for him. "He must have run into some more trouble, then. Maybe he had to go a long ways to lose them."

"We can't wait for him long, Tulip. The Bureau is still after us," Lydia said, then corrected herself, "After you."

"He'll be here," she replied, unconvincingly. She looked over at the other three, frowning. With a small _hmph_ , she climbed onto the hood of a nearby car and cupped her hands around her mouth.

"Hello!" she called. "Max?"

Harris was on her in a second, pulling her down by her arm. "Don't _yell_ ," he hissed. "I don't suppose you brought a flashing neon sign, too?"

"Don't talk to me like that," she snapped, pulling her arm away from him and placing it on her hip. "You are so rude sometimes-"

"Just be quiet and get off the car before you attract every raider in DC."

Tulip was about to fire back a retort when Lydia saw something move out of her peripheral vision. Someone was perched on the overhanging sign post thirty yards away. The shadow shape poked its head up above one of the signs.

"Look out," she said, ducking behind the car. Harris and Andy were moving to join her when the figure behind the sign stood up taller and waved at them.

Tulip looked back at Lydia, then followed her line of sight to the signs. She leapt off the car and ran towards the figure. The rest of them followed as Max disappeared behind the sign again, then reappeared below it, hanging from the metal frame that held up the signs. He let go and dropped the forty feet to the ground, landing with a stumble but, apparently, no injury.

"Showoff," Lydia muttered.

Tulip embraced the android as he stood. Max grinned over her shoulder. He didn't look as though the rain had inconvenienced him much, though he was wearing different clothes than he'd had before. _Did the other ones disintegrate?_ Now that Lydia looked closer, his skin also looked a bit different. Smoother, like the surface had melted slightly.

"You're all alright. I'm glad," he said simply. From anyone else, it would have sounded sarcastic. But Max said it with almost naive sincerity, the same way he sounded most every time he spoke.

None of them responded as he and Tulip parted and looked back at them. "Has...something happened?" he said, seeing their expressions. Tulip watched the other three warily.

Lydia glanced at Harris, who carefully avoided her eyes. He didn't seem about to say anything, so she spoke up. "You lied," she said to Max bluntly.

The happiness in his artificial face disappeared completely. He knew instantly what she meant. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I know."

Not for the first time, Lydia got the impression that he was somehow looking up at her, despite him being over a foot taller than her. He swallowed, glancing down at the ground. "I've been thinking," he said. "I'm going to turn myself in."

"No," Lydia said at the same time as Tulip. She wondered, briefly, if the effects of this 'operator' thing were reciprocal.

"You're not doing that," Tulip continued.

Max looked at them with resigned dismay. "I thought you might say that," he sighed. Then he looked up at Lydia again. "Well, I knew Tulip would say that. I didn't think you would. In fact, I was hoping you'd convince her to let me go back."

She shrugged. "No."

"Why?"

"Slavery is wrong."

"Even slavery of man-made beings?"

Lydia had been thinking about this-about all the things Max had done, how different he was from even the other synths. He was unique. To call him a robot was oversimplifying. Man-made, maybe, but not inhuman. "Yes," she said. "Even then."

Max looked at her blankly. Then he smiled a tiny bit. "You know," he said quietly, with the air of someone divulging an embarrassing secret, "sometimes I still don't really understand organic behavior. But I like your flexibility."

"Thank you," Lydia said.

"I'm glad you changed your mind, but please, let me go back. I never thought it would be like this. I didn't think it would be easy, but I...this situation has spiraled out of control. Railroad members aren't supposed to be in the line of fire. Now Tulip's life is still endangered, as well as yours, and you didn't even volunteer for this like she did."

"Consider this me volunteering," Lydia said.

"No," Max said, shaking his head. "You don't understand." He ran his hand through his hair, staring at the ground. "It's not worth it anymore. It's not worth it for you, or me." He was beginning to look sick. "Even if you're willing to risk your life, I'm not. If any of you are hurt...any of you, not just Tulip and Lydia," he added, looking to Harris and Andy.

"Wow," Andy said. "Even me? I thought everyone hated me."

"We do," Lydia assured him.

"I don't." The momentary change of topic distracted Max enough that he calmed somewhat. "I don't know what you've done in the past, but as long as I've known you, you've done nothing to hurt anyone."

Andy raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

Lydia cleared her throat. "Well, anyway, I think it's time to stop for the night, and I'm sorry, but you're staying with us, Max." She turned to Harris. "Any idea where we should go?"

He nodded ahead of them, to a cliffside near the road, and started walking. As they went, he picked up a large dead branch that had been lying on the ground and hefted it over his shoulder. _For a fire_ , Lydia thought, and she picked up the next scrap of wood she saw, a two-by-four half coated in peeling white paint. By the time they got to the cliffside, they had amassed a small collection of kindling.

They stopped in a small cave at the base of the rocks. It was dark inside and impossible to see more than a short ways in. Lydia turned her flashlight on the darkness, and it turned out that the darkness only hid a few feet of the shallow inlet. She swept the light over the wall at the back, examining a pattern of deep reddish brown that was streaked across it. She followed the drips down to the floor, and jumped when her light fell on the skeleton there.

"Unlucky guy," Tulip said. Lydia moved the light over the floor, where several boxes and trunks were stacked next to some bedding. Most were open and empty, but one was still shut with a padlock over the latch in front. _Hey._

As Harris started building a fire behind her, she nudged a skeletal arm aside and knelt next to the lock, pulling a bobby pin from her hair.

It was a sturdy but simple lock, and she had it open within a minute. Inside was an assortment of small objects. She recognized the larger power cells that she needed for her new rifle, and took those. The rest were roundish metal things the size of her fist. She held one up and turned it over in her hand. At first she wondered if it was a broken off part of some other machine, but it was too self contained for that. It looked whole.

"Hey," she said, turning to the others. "Do you know what this is?"

"Bomb," Andy said.

She frowned. "What?"

"That's a pulse grenade," Tulip offered, walking over to bend over the box with her. She took the pulse grenade gently from Lydia's hand. "This is quite the find. Will these work on the other synths?" she asked Max.

"Oh, yes," he affirmed. "Very effectively."

Tulip put the grenade carefully back in the box. "Maybe just keep them in there," she suggested.

Lydia silently agreed, closing the box again.

Harris was cupping a hand around a match that he held under a scrap of paper. It went out before the paper caught fire. Lydia moved in front of him to block the wind as he dropped the burnt-out match next to another one on the ground.

"Thanks," he muttered without looking at her. He struck another match, and the paper flared. He put it under an orderly stack of small sticks and shards of wood he'd made, and the fire roared to life in moments. He stacked more, larger sticks around it.

After pausing to watch this process with interest, Lydia took the painted two-by-four she'd found and started peeling off the strips of paint. "We're out of stimpaks," she said, "and now we don't have any money. Maybe we should trade the grenades for some next time we pass a trader."

"We might not need stimpaks if we use the grenades," Tulip pointed out.

"Yeah," Lydia admitted. She picked at a crack in the paint.

"What are you doing?" Tulip finally asked her.

"Taking the paint off before we burn it. It'll give off toxic fumes if you don't."

"So?"

Lydia looked up at her. "It's bad for you."

Tulip gave her a strange look.

"What?"

She just shook her head. "Vault dwellers..."

Lydia shrugged and kept peeling, dropping the strips into the dirt next to her. "I don't suppose ANy-" she stopped when her voice cracked loudly. "Any..." When she tried again, it came out in a raspy half-voice. She coughed into her sleeve several times, and tentatively tried a third time. She was relieved when it sounded normal again. "Does anyone have any idea how they keep finding us? Are you sure you don't have a tracking device on you?" she said to Max.

He shook his head. "Positive."

"Then how did they find us again? How could they have gotten ahead of us?"

"I don't know. They must have seen the road, and with the rain, they assumed we'd follow it to the nearest building."

"But how did they get from the river to that particular road?"

Tulip spoke up from behind them. "What about him?" she said, pointing at Andy. He gave her a puzzled look.

"Why would he tell them?" Lydia said.

"That's not what I'm getting at. What if they planted a tracking device on _him_?"

Andy looked down at himself surreptitiously. "Don't you think I would have noticed it?"

"You might not be able to see it," Max replied. "With synths, they put it under the skin."

"Do they usually do that with their slaves?" Lydia asked.

"Not that I knew of, but it's possible." Max turned to Andy. "Did you notice any inexplicable cuts shortly after you were bought?"

Andy frowned, and was quiet for a moment. He hesitantly ran his hand along his side. Then his hand stopped suddenly, and he looked as if he might cry. "They put something under my skin?" he whispered.

"You found something?" Lydia asked.

He didn't confirm or deny it, but his miserable expression said enough.

She put down the piece of wood. "Let me see."

He hesitated, then slid off his jacket and lifted his shirt to let her see the thin scar there on the left edge of his back, perpendicular to his last rib. She felt along the line. There was something hard and square beneath his skin. _That definitely should not be there._

She turned back to Harris and gestured to the knife strapped to his leg. "Can I...?"

He unsheathed it and handed it to her hilt-first. As she turned back around, Andy was moving his arm curiously. She saw the green glow at the end of his hand, and realized he was raising his gun at her. She flinched, but he didn't shoot. He just held it there, aimed at her chest. She stared at it with wide eyes. No one moved.

"What are you doing?" Lydia said.

He looked at the knife in her hand. It was as long as her forearm. "I might ask you the same thing."

Lydia realized she was holding the knife up in what could be perceived as a threatening way, and she lowered it.

"Don't," Andy said, taking a step back. "Just don't move. You could have just told me to leave, alright? I'll go, they'll follow me, and no one has to get hurt."

"Andy, I was going to take that thing out of you."

He stared blankly at her. "Oh." He glanced around at the rest of them out of the corners of his eyes. Slowly he lowered the gun.

"Why would you think I was going to do something else?"

"...I don't know."

Something—a rock?—flew past Lydia and struck Andy in the head, and he toppled sideways, dropping his gun. Before he could react, Harris was on top of him with his hands clenched around his neck. Andy pried at his fingers, to no effect.

"Harris!" Lydia shouted. She ran over and wrenched at his arm, but he took no notice. "Harris, get off of him!" Andy's face was turning purple as he choked. He flailed, trying to hit his attacker's face, but Harris's arms were in the way and he couldn't reach him.

Then, thankfully, Max appeared, pulling Harris away by his other arm. Andy scooted back out of reach, then climbed to his knees. He held a hand to his throat as he coughed and gasped.

Harris tried to jerk his arm away from Max, but had no more success than Lydia had when she was trying to get _him_ off of Andy. He quickly stopped and relaxed in the android's grip, still breathing hard. He let Max pull him to his feet, away from Andy, still glaring at the ex-slaver. Then he dropped his eyes to the side and, if Lydia wasn't mistaken, looked embarrassed.

"Let go of me," he said through gritted teeth. Max paused, then dropped his arms. Harris didn't move. He waited until Andy stopped coughing and looked up at him.

"If you ever point a gun at her-at any of us again, I will kill you."

Andy looked at him without saying anything. After a beat, Harris returned to his place next to the fire. Andy tensed when he picked up his rifle from the ground, but he merely put it back over his shoulder. Andy's gun was on the ground a few feet away from him. He slowly retrieved it and put it back at his side, watching Harris all the while. They glared at each other.

"How about no one kills each other yet," Tulip said timidly. "Just until we've got the common enemy dealt with, huh? Then you guys can fight all you want."

Everyone was quiet.

Lydia sighed inwardly, wondering how she came to be part of such a strange group. She shook her head helplessly and looked at the knife in her hand. It was clean, but she could see small flecks of blood on the handle and the edge of the blade. She had to make sure it was clean, she remembered. Andy couldn't fight off infection as easily as a ghoul. She went back to Harris's pack and got out packages of alcohol wipes and several bandages.

"You _do_ want me to do this, don't you?" Lydia asked Andy as she turned to him.

"Yes," he said after a moment, obviously still distracted. Then his eyes rested on the knife again. "You're going to use that?"

"It's much sharper than anything else we have. You'll hardly be able to feel it."

He nodded slowly as she took out one of the wipes and cleaned the knife off, then wiped her own hands with it.

"Will you lie down?" she asked.

He took a breath and got on his stomach on the ground-far away from Harris. Lydia held up her flashlight. "Will someone hold this for me?"

Max stood immediately and took the light from her. He clicked it on and knelt next to Andy, holding it over his back.

Lydia pulled Andy's shirt up and wiped at the scar with another alcohol wipe. Even for a smoothskin, his skin was unusually healthy. The even, featureless flesh contrasted starkly with Lydia's rough and flaking hands.

"You know," Lydia said quietly, "you seem a lot more unstable now that you're not in control of everyone around you."

He didn't reply. Lydia lined up the end of the knife next to his scar. Then she stopped. "Are you holding your breath?"

He let out a long breath, then took in another.

"Did I ever tell you I ran the clinic in my vault?" she asked him.

"No." He seemed to relax some.

"I'm cutting now," Lydia warned him, and sliced another line into his skin, longer than the one next to it. Andy squeezed his eyes shut. "Would that have made me worth more?" she asked.

He opened his eyes, exhaling again. "Yes. Definitely."

Lydia could see the edge of the metal object there between layers of skin and muscle and fat and a small pool of blood. She reached inside with the knife and carefully cut away at parts that had already grown back over the device. Andy sucked in his breath and held it again.

"Keep breathing," she reminded him. Having nothing else with which to reach into the wound, she took hold of the black square with her fingers and gradually pulled it out.

Andy let out a shaky breath as the last bit of the object came out. "Is that it?"

She held it out for him to see. It drop of blood slid off of it and onto the ground in front of him.

"Ugh." He turned away.

"You should go now," Lydia said to him as she cleaned the cut.

Andy paused for a moment. "I'd like to stay," he told her quietly.

"Why would you possibly want to do that?"

"I want to help you."

"...You want to help an android, a woman you hardly know, and someone who's threatened to kill you twice?"

He frowned. "No," he said, even quieter. "I want to help _you_."

Lydia stopped, holding a band-aid in mid-air.

He continued, "And if we're counting, he's threatened me at least three or four times and that's the second time he tried to kill me. So if you're wondering why I'm acting 'unstable', that would be part of it."

She stuck the last band-aid on, forming a line of them covering the entire cut. "It's still bleeding," she told him. "Keep your hand pressed over it." She picked up the device again, cleaning it off with one of the discarded wipes. She looked it over, then took one edge in each hand and was about to snap it in half when Max put a hand on her arm.

"Wait," he said. "I've been thinking some more. I have an idea."


	15. Chapter 15

"I have an idea."

"Is this idea something more creative than 'give up'?" Lydia said.

"I think we should fight them," Max replied.

"Fight them?" Tulip said incredulously. "Like, on purpose?"

He cleared his throat. "I saw a sign for a Robco facility to the south of here. It's a recycling plant, which means it's where old and broken robots are taken to be deconstructed and recycled. I used to work in a recycling plant at the Institute. If the Robco facility is anything like the one we had, it will be a hazardous place for synths."

"You think we should lead them into a trap at the facility?" Lydia asked.

"It's a place that was specifically designed for breaking down robots. It will probably be more effective at doing so than shooting them would be."

"That actually sounds like a pretty good idea," Tulip said.

"You really think we're ready for a confrontation with them?" Lydia asked.

"We've already thinned their numbers quite a bit," she replied. "As far as I remember, a few of their synths are dead, and we've either killed or freed almost ten humans since we first saw them near Underworld."

"That's more than half of them," Andy put in. "We could take the rest, especially with those pulse grenades."

Lydia looked at Harris. "What do you think? Should we try to get this over with?"

He nodded. That was good enough for her. She looked at the chip she'd pulled out of Andy. "We'll keep this until we get there, then?" she said, and pocketed it. "How far is it?"

"The sign said ten miles," Max said.

They could be there tomorrow. They were running out of food, and there were no stimpaks left. They needed to find a trader, but if they delayed much longer the Bureau would catch up to them again. They'd just have to hope they ran across something on the way to the Robco facility, because they couldn't spend time making trips elsewhere. If they ran into the Bureau again before they reached the Robco building, they might not be lucky enough to survive the encounter.

-lll-

This retrieval mission, obviously, was not going so well. Elle had to acknowledge that. As she stalked down the highway, she pushed at the bandage that was wrapped around her head and was encroaching on her vision.

Five of her agents remained. They'd lost another synth when they'd run into that town full of super mutants (the brute would be disappointed when it got to wherever it was taking the A2 and finally realized it wasn't even human). Far too many of their number had escaped or been killed. They couldn't afford to keep trying to capture the N5 alive.

Her fury had been building since Underworld. She'd tried being nice. She'd tried negotiating. Then she'd tried forcing the N5 back by threatening his operators. She might have even let the operators live, if they didn't cause too much trouble. She could easily have simply killed the escaped synth and the people who helped him, but she'd done everything she could to keep him alive. All of this she'd done for someone who no longer had any direction or purpose, no sense of duty or understanding of laws, no respect for the ones who had given him life or those he had the privilege to serve. The thanks she'd gotten for it was a bullet in the head.

There were no more options left, now. This had gone on too long, and they'd lost too many men. One escaped android was not worth the lives of half the Bureau.

"When we find them, we kill them all. We're not losing them again," Elle said to the others. None of them responded, but they didn't need to. She knew they heard her and understood. They knew better than to argue or comment, too, though she knew most of them had wanted to give up a long time ago.

"Elle," one of them said a short while later. She turned to him. He wouldn't be speaking if it wasn't something important. He gestured to their left. "Three organics. They've been traveling adjacent to us for several minutes. They appear well-armed."

Elle slowed to look. She couldn't see anything. It wasn't surprising. Most of the synth models had better eyes than she. She stopped, putting a hand above her eyes to shade them from the sunlight, and the others stopped around her. After a moment, she saw figures in dark armor moving, camouflaged among the rocks.

"What are _they_ doing?" she murmured. As they stopped, the other figures did, also. _They're following us?_ she wondered. Or they'd just been watching them. In the middle of nowhere like this, you could never be sure whether the next person you ran into would try to kill you if you got too close to them. The two groups watched each other warily.

"They all have matching armor," one of the synths informed Elle. "There's a white symbol on the chest plate."

"They're mercenaries," Elle said. There was an organization called Talon Company in this area whose members wore armor like that. The three humans stood there in the rocks, watching them motionlessly. Elle raised her arm and waved them over. After a moment, there was some movement from the rocks.

"They're coming this way," the synth said to her.

She nodded. "Keep your weapons holstered. If they make any threatening moves, disarm them." They waited as the mercenaries approached.

They stopped some ten yards away. A young man with large mirrored sunglasses stood in front of them, flanked by two others in the same worn combat armor. He nodded to Elle.

"We're looking for some hired help," Elle said simply.

The one with the sunglasses inclined his head, smirking. "Looks like you could use it," he said, looking at her bandage.

"We need to take out five people. We could probably do it ourselves, but I don't want to take any chances. With the eight of us, it would be no contest."

"Sounds good, but we're on another assignment right now," the mercenary said. He held out a card with a number scribbled on it. "Get on this radio frequency to contact the Company. They'll send someone out for you, but it might take a few days for them to get all the way out here."

"We can't wait," Elle said, ignoring the card. "You're already here. _You_ help us. It won't take long. You can take a break from whatever you're doing."

The man lowered the arm that had proffered the card and dropped it. "No, we can't. Get on the radio if you want to do business with us," he said, pointing to the card. "And try to be more polite to them than you're being now-it'll lessen your chances of getting someone who doesn't know what they're doing."

The mercenary turned to leave, and Elle grabbed his arm to stop him. "You either help us now, or you die," she decided. The man drew his gun, but before he could raise it one of the synths had ripped it from his hand and smashed it. The synth drew the man's arm back and twisted it behind him effortlessly.

The leader cried out when the the synth was close to dislocating his arm. The android lessened his grip slightly as the man stopped struggling. He looked back at his partners, but they were in similar positions. His gun was on the ground at his feet, dented and bent beyond repair. He could see the impressions of fingers on it where the synth had squeezed it, like it was made of clay. He stared at it.

Elle stepped around in front of him. He looked down at her from over the top of the sunglasses that had slid down his nose in the struggle. "Like I said, we could take them ourselves. We've recently lost some men, so there are fewer of us than we'd planned on. That's where you come in. You'll only be there to bolster our numbers."

"Yeah," said the man uneasily. "I believe that."

"We'll pay well, and you'll hardly have to do anything."

"We're not supposed to freelance," said one of the other mercenaries, speaking for the first time. "But, I think we could, just this once, right?" He looked at the one with the glasses.

After a moment, the he nodded. The synth let him go. He took a small step back from the android, looking at the crunched gun on the ground. "That was a nice gun," he lamented.

Elle took a plasma rifle from one of the synths and handed it to the man, who took it cautiously. "You three follow me. I'll give you further orders when we catch up to the sons of bitches we're after."

The mercenary readjusted his glasses and slung the rifle over his shoulder. "Mind if I ask who that is?"

"Five of them," Elle repeated as she continued down the road, followed closely by the others. "One like him," she gestured over her shoulder to one of the synths. "Two ghouls, one male, one female. One human male and one human female."

The mercenaries exchanged glances. "Interesting," the leader said, "that the group we're looking for also matches that description."

The redhead stopped, looking over her shoulder. "You think you're looking for the same people we are?"

"It's an unusual group. You don't see humans and ghouls traveling together often, and it'd be quite a coincidence if it was two separate groups who were both traveling down this road at the same time."

Elle raised her eyebrows. "So what did _you_ want with them?"

"We were going to kill them." He would have preferred to take the one they were after alive, actually, but it looked like that was unlikely to happen now.

She smiled. "Oh, good. It looks like you won't have to put your mission on hold, after all."

"Looks like," the man said, not returning the smile.

-lll-

Lydia turned to make sure that everyone was still on track. The group had separated and walked farther apart than normal. Andy hung back by himself, a longer distance away than he had in the past. She couldn't blame him. Tulip and Max walked to the side, speaking quietly enough that Lydia couldn't hear what they said. Once in a while the quiet would be broken by Tulip's laugh, or a particularly excited statement made in a raised voice. Lydia smiled as she watched them.

She turned back to Harris.

"What?" he said, still looking straight ahead.

"Are you worried? Do you think this will work?"

"Depends what the facility is like."

She nodded. She watched a pair of birds fly overhead. It was a fairly rare sight. There weren't many birds left. When they flew out of sight, she looked at her feet, absently fingering the strap of her rifle. It tended to get too tight around her neck and pull uncomfortably. "How are you?" she said, looking up at him again.

Harris rolled his eyes.

Lydia smiled. "Hey, you can just answer me, you know. You don't have to act like it's a stupid question."

"I'm fine."

"You've been pretty quiet lately."

He rolled his eyes again.

"Quieter than usual."

"Maybe I should prattle on and on like you and Tulip."

"Hey!" Lydia said in surprise. "I don't prattle." He didn't reply. Lydia glared ahead. Tulip laughed somewhere behind them. Lydia looked back, and she was talking to Max through a large grin, resting a hand on his arm. She looked around to the right and briefly caught eyes with Andy, who'd been looking at her. He looked away.

"Why did you attack Andy last night?" Lydia said to Harris.

"He pointed a gun at you," he said in a mildly patronizing tone.

"It was a misunderstanding."

"Oh, well, I suppose it _is_ alright to shoot someone, so long as it's because of a misunderstanding."

"Have you run out of cigarettes or something?"

"No."

Lydia stared at the ground. She watched his legs moving rhythmically beside her. There was no sign of the person she had seen last night, but Lydia knew he was buried in there somewhere. He'd attacked Andy after he'd already lowered his gun, and had been too blind with rage to even use his weapon, instead attacking him with his bare hands. It was strange. It was something she never would have thought she'd see him do, even to Andy.

"It scared me," Lydia said. Her voice cracked, and she quickly cleared it.

Harris glanced down at her, finally. "I wasn't trying to scare you," he said.

Lydia nodded.

"I was angry," he said.

"I know, I saw."

"Sorry."

Lydia nodded again. They walked for a short while longer when Harris spoke up again.

"Lydia...the other day, in the tunnels..."

She nodded.

"That was a mistake."

_A mistake?_ "Oh," Lydia said.

"I think, after this is done, we should part ways."

" _What?_ " Lydia exclaimed. "Why?"

"I'll take you back to Underworld. You'll be fine. Maybe Max and Tulip will let you help run Underworld Outfitters."

"But _why_?"

He just shook his head.

"I won't talk to you so much," Lydia offered desperately. "I'll practice shooting more. I can-"

"Stop," he interrupted.

She went quiet. She felt like she'd just been punched in the stomach. No, it was more like someone had ripped her stomach out of her body and then thrust it back in at the wrong angle.

"Hey, is that it?" Tulip called. Lydia looked up. There was a large grey building rising up in the distance.

They stopped when they reached the front of the building. It was a large complex, with smaller structures around the main one. There were several tall silos along the side of the larger building, connected to it by pipes, and behind the building there rose another strange, complex metal structure. A fire escape zigzagged down the other side of the building.

The building was, for the most part, unmarked. As they approached the single, unadorned door, Lydia saw that there was a small plaque next to it reading simply, "Robco". Rust stains smeared down from the end of each letter.

"I don't hear anyone inside," Max said. Harris opened the door. It was dark and still inside. He stepped into the dim and disappeared. Lydia followed him.

The room they entered was cavernous. There was only one floor, though the building was several stories high. Boxes and pipes and all manner of machinery zigzagged across the floor and up toward the ceiling. A few holes were broken in the ceiling, and thin shafts of sunlight drifted down through the tangle of dark shapes in the room, and were diluted to nearly nothing by the time they reached the floor.

Lydia flipped one of a large set of switches on the wall. Nothing happened. She flicked the others experimentally. A light in the back of the building came on, but that was it. She spotted a suspended metal staircase along the wall. She traced its path with her eyes. It wound up along the wall, then turned onto the next wall, then turned again to the one after that on the opposite side of the room before it made it to a system of catwalks high above the machinery on the floor.

"Well?" Lydia said to Max. "Now what?"

He slowly scanned the room. Lydia watched as he stepped forward. He stopped at a stationary conveyor belt, which wound around back and forth across the room in a tight pattern, occasionally entering larger boxy structures and coming out the other side to continue on its way, and on several occasions splitting off into multiple other paths. He climbed onto the conveyor belt and moved toward the middle of the room. Lydia climbed up after him, hopping from belt to parallel belt.

They stopped in the middle of the room to look around again. At the far side of the building was a pair of ramps leading to garage doors. Near the doors was a freight elevator and another door with a stair symbol next to it, and next to that was a hall leading around a corner. "That's where they'd bring in old robots," Max surmised, pointing to the doors. "You could bring in truckloads of them through doors that size. Then you could move them onto the elevator or put them straight onto the belt if they've already been taken apart." He pointed around at other structures in the room. "Scrap is shredded into small pieces there and the metal parts are picked up by a magnet there. From there..." He followed the belt with his eyes as it sloped up and exited the building through a tunnel higher up on the wall. "It can be taken back outside to the blast furnace behind the building."

"Doesn't this bother you?" Lydia asked.

"Why would it?"

"That scrap you're talking about could be you. It'd be like if there were a bunch of dead bodies lying around," Lydia said.

Max gave the metal shreds on the floor conveyor belts a perplexed look, as though he hadn't thought of that before.

Lydia shrugged. "It's probably better if it doesn't, I suppose."

There was a soft creaking behind them, and Lydia looked around to see Harris climbing the rusted metal stairs on the wall. She watched him ascend the wall, circumventing a spot where the stairs had eroded away on the edge, leaving a gap of a few steps. Tulip stood next to her and Max, and Andy was back near the entrance, staring around at the musty facility. He sniffed, and sneezed in the dust.

"Where do you think that hallway goes?" Lydia asked, interrupting Max's reverie. She started toward it, pulling her rifle down to her side just in case. She jumped off the last conveyor belt in the row, letting up a cloud of dust as she landed. As she rounded the corner, she realized that the hallway wasn't really a hall, just a small offshoot behind a room that bulged out into the larger main room. In the alcove, there was a door with strange panel with several switches next to it.

"This is what we need," Max said. He opened the door. Lydia went to peer inside, but the room was completely empty. It was a just a square box. There was one long window, made of something clear but definitely not any type of glass Lydia had ever seen. The walls were particularly thick, and coated on the inside with some kind of metal sheeting.

"What is this?" Tulip said, looking over Lydia's shoulder.

"A room fitted with electromagnetic pulse emitters." He gestured to the panel next to the door. "Controlled by this."

Tulip paused. "This... is a gas chamber for robots."

Max cocked his head at them, glancing inside the room.

"This _must_ bother you," Lydia said.

"Yes," Max agreed quietly after a moment's thought.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Lydia asked.

"Of course," he said, but he didn't look completely sure. He looked at Lydia when she didn't say anything, and cleared his face. "We have to. I'm sure."

"How are we going to get them in there, then?" Tulip asked. "Somehow I doubt they'll happily dance into the room of death without any second thoughts."

"I don't think they'll understand what it is until it's too late," Max said. "I know about it because I used to work in a place like this. I've seen it before. The other ones probably won't have seen one. We're all built for a specific purpose, you know, and we rarely interact with models who work elsewhere. I'm a factory worker. The ones in the Retention Bureau are fighters and trackers. They don't spend a lot of time in the labs or factories."

"Still, how do we get them to go in?" Tulip said. "It sounds like one of us will have to lead them in there."

Max was quiet. Lydia guessed that was an idea he wouldn't want to agree to, but there wasn't an obvious alternative. The EM pulse wouldn't effect her or Tulip. One of them could go in and get back out safely while the synths had voltage surges.

"I'll do it," she said.

Max opened his mouth to protest.

"Let me do it," Lydia corrected herself. Max gave her a sullen look. She immediately felt guilty. This wasn't like last time when she'd been trying to help him overcome dilemmas in judgement that would be difficult for someone with an inorganic brain to solve. Now she was just using it against him because it was convenient for her. "Sorry."

"It's alright."

Lydia narrowed her eyes. "Can't you just disobey us? If you could leave the Commonwealth and lie and name your own operators-"

"No."

"Why?"

He sighed. "I just can't."

Her stomach sank a little lower. She couldn't imagine being bound by such rules. "Alright...I take it back, I guess. Uh...does that work?" she asked.

Max gave her a lopsided smile.

"But you know one of us has to do it. It might as well be me. Right, Tulip?"

"Then what's going to happen?" Tulip asked. Max didn't argue with Lydia. _He'd probably rather I went instead of Tulip, anyway,_ she realized. "You two will wait over here, Lydia will lead them in there, then you shut the door and zap them?"

"But what if they kill you before I do it?" Max asked. "Or what if they're human? The pulse won't effect them."

Lydia pulled at the end of a lock of hair as she thought. She looked past Tulip, down the hallway, and Andy was at the end, looking out one of the doors next to the stairs. "Leaving?" Lydia called to him.

He lowered the garage door, looking back at her. "No."

"How many of them were there, again?"

"About fifteen."

Lydia turned back to Max. "We've only killed two synths so far. In a group that big, they would have taken more with them, don't you think?"

"Probably," he admitted.

"And if they see you here, they'll send the strongest ones over to get you rather than risk killing their humans or the more organic synths."

"Yes," he agreed unhappily.

"Lydia," Tulip said. She reached into her pack and pulled out something that looked a bit like a Pip-Boy. "I've been saving this. You should use it when you go in there."

"What is it?"

"A Stealth Boy. It'll make you invisible."

"Invisible?" Lydia asked flatly, raising an eyebrow. "How-"

"You just do this to activate it. Trust me, it'll work. You better appreciate it, too," she said. "I used to make a killing selling those things. It's not easy to get your hands on one."

Not that Lydia thought Tulip was lying, but she had a difficult time believing the device would actual render her invisible. _Who knows. The military was making all sorts of weird things before the war._ She thanked her, and nodded to Max. "I'll lead them in there. You just shove them in and hurry up and turn it on. Um. If you want, I mean," she added awkwardly.

There was a screeching sound from the main room, and something clattered to the floor, loud and metallic. Lydia rushed out into the chamber. A cross section of thin metal poles lay on the floor. She looked quickly up through the catwalks until she saw movement through one of the perforated metal sheets that formed the walkways.

"The railings are not stable," Harris announced redundantly.

"Are you okay?" Lydia called back.

"Fine." He walked down the path to a lower section where he could see them. "I think we should be up here when they come. There's decent cover, and there's a ladder to the roof. I can climb up and see them coming from up there. We might be able to get it over with quickly if we can bomb them with the grenades from above before they have time to take cover."

They mapped out a plan of action. Harris, Tulip, and Andy would be on the catwalks, firing down from above. They divided the grenades between everyone in the group. Lydia declined one. Everything electronic on her would be destroyed by the electromagnetic pulse. Harris gave her a disapproving look when she explained her part of the plan, but said nothing.

Lydia sat against the wall at the outside corner of the hallway, wishing to take the Stealth Boy off. She rather liked the lack of weight there since she'd removed her Pip-Boy. She and Max waited there for what seemed like a long time. Harris had gone up on the roof to watch for the band of synths. Tulip paced on the walkway above Lydia, detouring around Andy, who was sitting still on the path.

"Anyone want to play twenty questions?" Tulip said. Lydia smiled. She turned the tracking chip over in her hand. A tiny light on it blinked. She didn't doubt that they'd be here soon. She wondered if they suspected it was a trap.

Then there was the sound of a the hatch to the roof opening, and footsteps over metal. "They're here," Harris said.


	16. Chapter 16

The front door opened, letting in a slice of light that was blinding in the darkness. Lydia squinted around the corner where she crouched. Several figures rushed through the door and ducked away, not silhouetting themselves in the light. Harris, Tulip, and Andy were perfectly still above them. Max stood next to her, not hiding as much as she was. He needed to be seen to draw them over here, after all.

As she watched the people at the front of the building, something was happening in the back. Another square of light grew on the floor next to one of the garage doors, which slid open surprisingly quietly. A figure stepped lithely under and crouched next to the door. He removed his grip from his plasma rifle for a moment to take his sunglasses off and set them on the floor behind him. He wore dark armor. A white painted talon shone on the side of his breastplate. Lydia's stomach dropped. Talon Company had caught up with them, as well. This was not good. They were outnumbered.

Two more figures scooted under the door, less gracefully than the mercenary. They wore a familiar dark blue uniform she'd come to hate. They closed the door behind them. Lydia raised her rifle at the mercenary. He was motionless in the shadows of the catwalks and machinery above. She lined up her sights with his forehead, but didn't fire. She had to wait, or waste the element of surprise they had on the ones at the front door.

On cue, there was an explosion that shook the floor and flared brightly in the entrance. The mercenary jumped and darted to the side. Lydia fired, too late. The laser grazed the back of his head, and he staggered and ducked behind one of the conveyor belts.

They synths at the garage doors turned and started toward them. One fired at Lydia, missing by a rather wide margin considering how close he was. Max stepped in front of her. "Go," he urged her. A stream of plasma hit his shoulder. He ignored it.

Lydia dropped her gun and ran down the corridor, and she could hear the synths following close behind with their unnaturally heavy footsteps. There was another explosion, this one sounding off with a high-pitched whine and an odd crackle. Bullets and plasma rained on the walls behind them. Max followed her, running past the doorway as she dove inside. She activated the stealth boy immediately and crouched in the corner next to the window. She looked down at herself, and saw only a faint shimmer over the cement floor. It had worked after all.

One of the synths ran in after her, but slowed when he saw the interior of the room. He scanned it quickly, and Lydia held her breath. He didn't see her. Fear flashed across his face. Just as he turned to run back outside, Lydia watched through the window as Max spun and hurled the other synth inside, and it collided noisily with the first synth. The door slammed shut and locked.

The first synth hammered on the door. There was no handle on the inside. When that didn't work, he moved to the window. It didn't budge.

The other one seemed to realize what was happening now, too. It stared carefully around the room. Its eyes moved over her, then continued past. Lydia felt a rush of relief again.

Then its gaze snapped back to her corner. It strode forward, and Lydia scrambled to get out of the way, but it reached out and grabbed her before she had time to move. She squirmed uselessly in its hands. Its grip wasn't the bone-breakingly strong kind, but it was more than enough. It stared at the approximation of where her face was, its eyes occasionally catching hers as they darted around. It looked furious. She was sure it was going to kill her.

Then she felt its grip on her arms slacken. It paused, still holding onto her. Then, "Take the Stealth Boy off." He let go.

For a moment, Lydia just stared up at his resigned face. _Well, I'd want to see the person who was responsible for my death, too, if it was me._ She slowly raised one arm to the other and unstrapped the Stealth Boy. Its effect was dispelled as soon as it broke contact with her skin. She dropped the device to the floor.

The synth scrutinized her. Lydia fought the urge to take a step back.

The other android had given up pounding, and now simply looked out the window. It turned at the noise behind it, and its eyes blazed when it saw Lydia. Now she did step back, overwhelmed by the memory of the sound of her bones crunching into pieces.

There was a rising, shrill sound that seemed to be coming from the walls. The synth reached for its gun. The other one looked lazily over his shoulder at him. Lydia backed to the other side of the small room, trying to keep the resigned synth in the middle of the room between them. It didn't help for long. There was nowhere to hide in such a small, empty place. She backed into the wall. The android with the gun stepped to the side of the other one and raised his weapon, his face contorted in rage.

The shrill sound came to a peak, and a wave of energy shot through her. Her muscles spasmed. The androids shook for a moment, then collapsed.

Lydia's ears rang. As she looked at the bodies sprawled on the floor, it struck her how quiet it was. All the insulation in the walls of the room sheltered it from the sound of the guns and grenades outside.

She walked up to the synth in the middle of the floor. She nudged it with her toe. "Hello?" she ventured. He didn't move. He was really dead. She bent down and closed his eyes, then did the same with the other. It had almost become a tradition since she'd left 101. She felt bad if she just left them staring into space.

There was a thump on the window, and she looked up. There was a flash of something moving that quickly whirled out of view. She hurried to the window. It took her a moment to figure out what was going on. Max was grappling with another synth. The synth took Max's arm and pulled sideways. Max fell on his back, but kicked out hard at the synth's stomach as soon as he hit the floor. The synth flew across the hallway.

Lydia shoved at the door, but it was still locked. She went back to the window and hit the thick glass with open hands as Max got up and ran by. She shouted his name, waving to get his attention. He paid no attention to her. Lydia moved to the far side of the window to get a better angle. She searched the vicinity outside, but could see nothing. Then Max was shoved back around the corner. He stumbled back and the other synth made a grab at him, but Max took hold of his arm, planted his foot, and swung him around into the wall. A long crack appeared in the concrete.

"Max, the door!" Lydia shouted, striking the window.

He turned then, and started toward the control panel, but the synth flung out an arm and grabbed his foot, holding him back. Max kicked him in the head and ran to the panel. Lydia flinched. The synth's head had twisted sideways to an angle that looked painful, but it quickly recovered and started up after him.

Lydia heard the lock click open just as the synth caught up to Max and threw him back down the hall, toward the main room. He dashed after him. Lydia nudged open the door and peeked out. The deafening echoes of gunshots filled her ears. But they were all in the main room. The hall was empty. She slipped through the door and hurried to the corner. Then she stopped. She'd discarded her gun next to the wall right there. Now it was gone.

She peered around the corner, crouched defensively behind the wall. Max and the synth were trading punches next to the conveyor belts, ducking and swinging in a sort of dance. The other synth seemed to know the dance a lot better than Max. Max threw a punch at the synth, who ducked out of the way and seized Max's wrist. He jerked it to the side, pulling Max off-balance. Max tried to kick him again, but this time the synth was expecting it, and stepped out of the way. They synth dragged him up and slammed him against a fifteen foot tall block of machinery. The protective siding on the block had been stripped away, exposing a collection of massive springs and pistons and gears. For a moment they stood there, gripping each other by the shoulders, shaking slightly as they each exerted equal pressure on the other one.

Suddenly the synth let go and moved to the side, still holding onto one of Max's shoulders. Max pitched forward in surprise, and as he tried to catch his balance the synth wrenched him back and pulled his arm into the machinery. In an instant he drew it across a gear, then reached up with his other hand and pulled down on the teeth of the cog.

Lydia gasped as the metal teeth crunched together over Max's arm. The synth turned at the sound, hearing it even through all the shooting going on above them. It started toward her. Max reached out and grasped for the synth, just managing to grab a piece of his clothing, but it simply batted his hand away. Max tried to yank himself away from the gear, to no effect. He pushed desperately at the teeth. It budged, barely. Not fast enough. Lydia wondered if there was any point in running.

She was still deciding which way to turn when she saw Max reach into his pocket. He pulled out an oblong object, held it for a moment, then rolled it across the floor toward the synth. It paused and looked behind itself in confusion. When it saw the object it hurried to pick it up, and as it was reaching for it the grenade detonated. There was a burst of crackling blue light. The synth stiffened and contorted horribly as the blast hit him, then slumped over.

Lydia leapt to her feet to go help Max, but halted in shock when she saw him. He was sagging to the floor, held up only by the arm still stuck in between the gears. His free arm was flung out to the side, hovering tensely in the air. Something almost muscular but somehow alien stood out under his skin as it quivered. His head hung limply forward, but shivered and jerked convulsively side to side. He'd caught himself in the edge of the blast.

She rushed over to him. "Max?" she asked. Her voice shook. He didn't answer her. She knelt down so she could look up at his face. His eyes were rolled to the side, occasionally twitching forward, then back again.

She saw someone running out of the corner of her eye, and turned to look out at the main room. Someone streaked from one block of machinery to another, shooting up at the catwalks. She was about to turn back to Max when she spotted the mercenary in the shadows-barely visible in the dark of the building-under the conveyor belt near them. It was the one she'd shot at only a few minutes ago. She froze in surprise, and they stared at each other. Then she dove to the side and bolted back to the door to the stairs a few yards away. A laser shot past her, then another. _That's_ my _gun,_ she thought angrily in a sudden surge of possessiveness. _He had a plasma rifle before. That jerk stole my gun._

She stumbled forward to tear open the door and slam it shut behind her just as another laser hit it. It didn't pass through the door, but she could feel the heat from it in the handle.

She rushed down the stairs to the first landing, her heart beating out of her chest. She heard the door handle begin to turn, then stop. She dared to pause and look back up the stairs. The door rattled as the mercenary shook it. The handle wouldn't turn past halfway down. Lydia could see the man in the square window above the handle. He glared down at her. He'd melted the mechanism behind the handle with the laser when he shot it. "It's your own fault," Lydia pointed out, not that he could hear her.

He turned away from the window and disappeared. Lydia waited on the stairs, unsure what to do next. She was trapped there now that the door was stuck.

Then there was another sound. It was loud and grating, and screeched through the walls of the stairwell. The elevator. She'd forgotten about the elevator. She sprinted down the remaining stairs and burst through the door at the bottom. It opened into a long, wide hallway. There was another door on the wall in front of her and the elevator to the left, grinding its way up to the main floor.

She yanked on the door in front of her, but it was locked tight. She turned and ran down the corridor to the right at full tilt. The other end of it seemed painfully far away. There was a doorway halfway down the hallway, and as she passed it a strange sensation came over her. Her limbs tingled and there was a smell...metallic. She could taste it. She slowed to look inside. The entire room glowed. Something was leaking from one wall, and there was a pool of something gathered on the floor. She could feel the radiation coming out of the area in waves. She could hide in there, except the room was only a small alcove. The mercenary would simply shoot her from a safe distance outside of the room.

She ran on until she came to the end of the hall, where it split into another perpendicular one. There was what looked like a closet to the right, and the hall stretched out farther on the left. There was a clank behind her as the elevator reached the basement floor. She leapt to the side and continued down the left corridor. The elevator doors squeaked open behind her. She forced herself to slow her pace to keep quiet. There was another pair of doorways at the end of this hall. She opened the one on the left. Inside was a spacious room filled with boxes and trunks of every size, on the ground or on shelves. Cabinets lined the walls. There was a door at the far end of the room-the locked one near the stairs, she realized. As she watched, there was a sharp noise and the door jerked open a crack. It was blocked by one of the boxes. _He thinks I locked it after I went inside._ He shoved at the box, getting the door open bit by bit, and Lydia quickly shut her own door.

She turned and entered the other door beside her. She stepped inside, closed the door as quietly as she could, then looked around. It was small, probably meant to be a closet like the one at the other end of the hall, but it seemed to have been made into some kind of medical station. There was a first aid kit tacked up on the wall and a cot next to it. A refrigerator sat against another wall. There was a desk and a chair to the side. Nothing that could be used as a weapon. Lydia cursed. She took the first aid box off the wall and opened it. It had already been looted before she got there, and only a thin roll of gauze and an empty stimpak remained. She swore again.

She checked the fridge as well. The light wasn't on when she opened it, and it was warm inside. There was a selection of tiny bottles on the shelves. Most were empty. She scanned the labels quickly. There were two that still contained liquid. They were filled with penicillin.

She heard the mercenary in the other room. A box slid across the floor noisily.

Another bottle lay on its side at the back of the shelf. Lydia's hands shook as she reached in and hurriedly picked it up. Her heart nearly stopped. It was a sedative. She grabbed the empty stim from the first aid kit and jumped behind the desk. She crawled under it and hurriedly sucked the liquid out of the bottle with the stim.

The door opened. She froze. The mercenary stood in the doorway. She could see his feet from under the desk. Slowly, she set the bottle down on the floor next to her.

There was a distant explosion from the floor above, breaking the painful near-silence in the room. The man took a step forward, and his feet turned to the side as he looked around the room. Lydia struggled to keep still. Every heartbeat seemed thunderous, every movement amplified and obvious. She watched his weight shift as he moved, his shin guards twisting minutely to reflect the dim light. He turned until the toes of his boots pointed at her. She held her breath.

Before she could react, a hand had reached out and wrapped around her ankle. She hit her head on the front surface of the desk and was thrown to the floor as he pulled her roughly out from under it. Then he was kneeling with one knee on her chest to keep her still and her own gun was jammed against her cheek.

He looked as though he'd had every intention of killing her without further ado, but he paused as he looked at her.

"You're just a kid," he said with a slight frown.

"I'm older than I look," Lydia said as she jabbed the needle into his thigh.

He slapped her hand away, too late. It was already half emptied into him. He glared at her. "What was that?"

Lydia was quiet. The merc's eyes widened and the gun shook, and Lydia could tell he was feeling the effects of the sedative already.

" _What was that?_ " he said more urgently. He grasped the front of her shirt and shook her. " _Undo it! Undo it or I'll kill you!_ " Then his eyes glazed and his grip weakened. He rolled off of her and his eyes shut.

Lydia stood and took her rifle from his hands. She checked the energy left in the MF cell. She took out the nearly empty one and slid in a full one in its place. Leaving the mercenary where he was, she hurried back down the hall to the elevator.


	17. Chapter 17

The elevator squeaked and whined and ground as it carried her up. The doors creaked open when it reached the main floor, and Lydia slid out into the shadows of the back corner of the building. Max hung motionlessly from his stuck arm. The gunshots that were still being traded seemed to have covered the ruckus made by the elevator.

There was a shout, and another explosion on the catwalks. Lydia's hands tightened around her rifle fearfully. It was a real grenade, not one of the electronic ones. With the explosion came a blinding flash of green and a groan of metal bending. Lydia could see now. The blast had gone off where Harris, Andy, and Tulip had been. Andy had been flung off the path and had just managed to catch hold of a thin strut that held up the railing, and now he clung there, hanging off the edge of the walkway. Tulip lay apparently unconscious on the edge of the metal platform. Harris had been thrown against a collection of pipes that rose up next to the walkway, but Lydia could see him moving. Someone else was running up the stairs on the wall, and Lydia watched through the holes in the catwalk as Harris raised his rifle with visible difficulty and shot at them.

A section of the catwalk began to fall under Tulip's weight, weakened by the plasma that was still eating through the metal. A corner of it bent slowly downward, and she slowly slid toward the broken edge. Harris leapt forward and caught her arm. She swung down off the side of the platform and Harris hung onto the railing with his other arm to keep from falling down himself. His assault rifle dropped from his side, slid down the angled sheet of metal, and fell to the floor that must have been forty feet below. Something broke off as it slapped against the hard floor.

The footsteps came again and drew Lydia's attention to the catwalks above and to the right. She could see someone sprinting down them. There was no way she'd be able to shoot them from this angle. She quickly tip-toed across the floor toward the front of the building.

Harris struggled to pull up Tulip before the person got to them, but it was too late. She slowed as she approached, confident in her victory. As Lydia rounded a block of machinery and looked up through the holes in the walkway, she saw deep red hair, partly covered by a white bandage encircling the woman's head. She pointed her gun at Harris, and Lydia fumbled for her own in a panic, but Elle didn't shoot yet.

"No," she said to Harris, who hadn't seen her and was still struggling with Tulip. "You stay there." He stopped moving and slowly looked up at her over his shoulder.

She turned to Andy, who was reaching up to grasp the holes punched in the metal floor and pull himself up. She didn't have to say anything. He froze when she looked at him. Lydia crept through the shadows, careful to avoid bits of metal that would make noise if she touched them.

"N5-07," Elle called. "I'm about to kill your friends."

There was no answer. No movement. The building was silent.

Elle looked around the building, waiting for a reaction, then looked back at Harris and Andy when none came. "Well, that's one problem solved."

"I thought you were supposed to bring him back to the Institute," Andy ventured.

The woman turned on him abruptly. "He didn't deserve to go back," she hissed. "He was an abomination. He broke the rules. It isn't done. You wouldn't understand."

Andy stared at her blankly. The bar he was holding on to suddenly creaked and jerked backward a fraction as it began to break.

"Don't you think we'd all like to be able to do whatever we want? But we can't, because it's not allowed. You can't just..." She became visibly agitated, running a hand through her hair. "You can't."

"Yes you can," Andy said.

"No!" Elle shouted back. "You're a slave! You'll always be a slave! Just because you pretend you're not doesn't make it true!" She ran a hand over her hair again. "Just like he'll always be a synth. He should have known there was no escaping it. Everyone else has already accepted it." She looked away from Andy, putting her hand to the bandage on her head.

Lydia narrowed her eyes at the woman, suddenly seeing something she hadn't seen before. L. Was that what they had been calling her? L, not Elle.

Harris bowed his head in exhaustion. His arms were shaking. The woman turned to him. "Are you the one who shot me?" she asked.

Harris didn't move.

"Look at me."

He slowly looked up. Lydia scooted around another tall metal structure and stepped over a dead mercenary. She almost had a good shot from there.

"It must have been you," L said. "Everyone else was accounted for." She carefully reached down and drew the long combat knife from its sheath on his leg, staring into his eyes the whole time. He still refused to let go of Tulip. "That hurt," she stated coldly.

Lydia lined up her shot with L's head, kneeling down to steady herself. Her sights aligned with the woman's right eye. She nudged one of her feet an inch to the side to balance her weight, and a piece of scrap metal there scraped across the ground.

L whipped around, moving her gun from Harris to her. They fired at almost the same time, and Lydia saw her laser hit the woman's head just before L's plasma hit her.

It was like a steel fist punching her in the chest. She staggered back in the impact. For a second she felt nothing, then the pain hit her, and it felt as though all the breath had been sucked from her body. She looked down, and there was a red spot below her collarbone, over her left lung. The spot widened, growing into a gushing, deep crimson stream down her shirt.

She felt as though her insides had been filled with lead. Her legs shook, then gave out beneath her and she fell to the cold cement floor. Every movement was excruciating; every breath like a knife in her lungs. She clasped a hand over the wound in panic. _There are no stimpaks left._

There were hurried footsteps over her head, and her heart pounded even faster. Blood gushed out over her hand. She struggled to raise her gun as the footsteps crashed down the metal stairs behind her. The loudness of the sound terrified her. The person came closer, tramping across the conveyor belts and over the cement and scrap metal on the floor. She pushed her gun up, one-handed, and fired desperately at the figure that appeared above her.

The gun was ripped from her hands and thrown aside. Harris dropped to her side and pressed both hands down over her wound. Lydia writhed and let out a strangled sound at the pain. She choked, and felt blood spilling from her mouth.

Harris looked at the injury, and the blood, with wide eyes. "What do I do?" he asked her, as though her having worked in a clinic meant that she might happen to have some magic cure for getting shot in the chest on hand. She just looked at him as her chest throbbed agonizingly. Her vision seemed sharp and blurry at the same time. Everything looked unreal.

He almost looked as though he were in as much pain as she was. "Lydia, tell me what to do!"

_Nothing,_ she would have said if she could speak. _There's nothing you can do. There's no chance of surviving this without a stim. Maybe not even then._ The mercs might have had stimpaks when they came in, but they would probably have used them during the fight, and there was no time to go searching for them anyway. Lydia stared at the light of the sun though the holes in the ceiling.

Then she remembered. She looked back at Harris urgently. She swallowed painfully. " _Down..._ " she gurgled, and had to cough wetly. " _Rads...down...stairs._ " There was a horrible sound as the blood rose in her throat again.

It took Harris a moment to understand what she'd said. Then he picked her up and was running to the stairwell. He shoved at the handle, but it wouldn't budge.

" _Elev..._ " Lydia muttered. She couldn't breathe.

He turned to the lift and punched the button. The doors squeaked open to let them in. He jumped inside and hit the down button several times in a row to make sure it worked. The doors paused in their open position, then lazily moved back in toward each other. Lydia could feel the blood streaming from her back and she heard it hitting the floor. Harris repositioned his arm to cover the wound. She clutched a handful of his shirt and buried her face in his sleeve. He held her tighter.

The elevator screeched downward. It clunked and vibrated and sounded like it would break down any second. Lydia watched her blood pool next to Harris's arm, then overflow and spill to the floor. She could still feel the plasma in her lung, burning as it ate through flesh. The elevator groaned and slowed to half the speed it'd been going before. Harris swore. He looked down to check on Lydia.

She struggled to keep her eyes open. She was beginning to feel very tired. She sagged and shook her head slightly. The movement made her dizzy.

Finally the elevator stopped. Harris kicked at the doors when they didn't open immediately. After an achingly long second, they slid apart. He turned sideways and edged out before they'd opened all the way. He paused, looking around for the source of the radiation, then sprinted down the hall. Lydia closed her eyes. The pain started to fade. She couldn't feel her body. It felt as though she'd disappeared. It felt alright. She was too tired to stay awake, anyway. The bouncing with each step seemed to slow, and the sound of Harris's feet hitting the ground grew quieter and echoed distantly.

Then she could feel the radiation on her skin. It woke her up a bit. She squinted her eyes open and they were nearing the room. A metallic taste, different than the blood, filled her mouth, and her throat tingled. They reached the doorway, and the interior of the room glowed faint, ethereal yellow-green. It was strangely inviting. Lydia could feel the radiation coming out in waves. It seemed to thicken the atmosphere. As they went inside and got closer to the far wall, the density of it grew and grew, and the amount of it was overwhelming. She could feel it in the very air. It seemed to press in on them from all around. Her skin burned. Her limbs were on pins and needles. She gasped and clenched a fist around the front of Harris's shirt again. He set her on the ground, seeming unconcerned about it.

Lydia coughed and choked up more blood. She swallowed hard, and her chest started to hurt less. The burn of the radiation was shocking at first, but she realized it didn't really hurt. It was like stepping into hot water. She tried to relax. Soon she felt almost numb to it.

She breathed in slowly and carefully. She could still barely keep her eyes open, but she was aware enough to feel that the pain where she'd been shot was dissipating. Breathing was getting easier. She slowly reached up to the burn hole in her shirt and touched it. The skin had already grown back.

Harris was looking at her anxiously. Lydia looked back at him. She suddenly felt the wet spots her tears had left on her face, and wiped them off with the back of her hand. Harris smiled. With what little strength she had left, Lydia threw an arm around his neck, pulled him down, and pressed her lips against his.

He tipped forward and almost fell as she pulled him off balance. He paused there for a moment, then abruptly pulled away from her. Lydia pulled her arms back to herself, folding them tightly over her stomach. Her face wasn't heating up. _Well, there's one good thing about severe hemorrhaging. At least I don't have enough blood to go all red._

Harris gazed at the wall, his smile gone. Lydia realized he had burns on his face that she hadn't seen before, from the plasma grenade.

The silence drew out horribly then, so Lydia cleared her throat weakly. "Thanks."

"Mm-hm," he uttered shortly.

Another awful length of silence. Harris reached into a pocket of his blood-soaked jacket and pulled out a cigarette. He was about to light it, then stopped when he saw that half of it was stained red. He looked at it for a moment, then lowered his arm and tapped the red and white cylinder idly against the ground instead. He glanced up once to check Lydia's injury, but didn't look at her face.

"I don't want to go back to Underworld. I want to stay with you," she told him, almost under her breath. There was more silence. She continued, a little louder, "And don't tell me it's not a good idea. Obviously you need me along to save you from androids once in a while."

He gave her a small smirk, but it quickly disappeared. Lydia sighed quietly, dropping the fake confidence. _You're not Quinn,_ she thought, but didn't have the courage to say it.

Then, slowly Harris moved a hand, still wet with her blood, to the side of her face, and Lydia stopped thinking. He leaned down hurriedly, as though before he could change his mind, and, in a course of action she really had not expected him to take, kissed her again. His hand slid around to the back of her neck, barely touching her skin, and she couldn't help smiling against his mouth.

After a moment he broke away and leaned his forehead against the ground above her shoulder, sighing. Lydia wrapped an arm around his shoulders to keep him from pulling away again. Neither of them moved for a long time. She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing as her injury healed from the outside in, rads gradually creeping their way through her skin.

She stiffened when she heard a noise. She listened, and it came again. Someone yelling far away. "Andy," she said.

Harris let go of her and straightened up. "No, that's the one with skin. I'm Harris."

"You have to go help him." Her voice rasped, and she coughed.

"Yeah, yeah..." He went to pick her up again.

"No, wait," she said. "Leave me here. I need more rads."

"You shouldn't stay here much longer."

"I know. Just a little more."

He nodded in agreement. He stood, giving her one last look, then turned and walked back down the hallway. His footsteps gradually receded and finally blended into the sound of the air echoing through the chambers.

-lll-

Andy's arms burned. They were almost numb now. The bar he had his elbows hooked around creaked and slowly bent backward. He tried again to lift himself up onto the catwalk, but his arms simply wouldn't move past a certain point. He'd been hanging there too long. He was completely drained.

Tulip was still unconscious on the walkway a few feet away, and Andy could see the android below him. "Max?"

He slowly lifted his head a fraction. "Rebooting," he said in a flat voice.

"Help me."

The synth stood unsteadily and tried to turn, only to be stopped by his arm, stuck in the machine next to him. "Obstruction." His mouth didn't move when he spoke.

The bar creaked faster and suddenly began to break off. In a panic, Andy broke his grip on it and flung out his arm to catch ahold of the holes in the walkway. The bar broke and tumbled to the ground, landing with a loud rattle. He cringed as the rough metal cut into his fingers. "Hello?" he yelled. "Harris?"

He waited for what seemed like an eternity. There was no answer. The joints in his fingers felt like they would be torn apart. He was too afraid to try to pull himself up again. Exerting the extra energy might just deplete the strength that was keeping him from falling outright.

Then he heard the elevator again. He tried to readjust his grip, which only made him slip away more. He was hanging by the tips of his fingers by the time the elevator reached the ground floor. The doors squeaked open, and he carefully craned his neck to see. The ghoul glanced up at him dispassionately as he came through the doors, then strode across the facility floor, climbing over the rows of conveyor belts. _Well, it's better than no one._

Harris climbed the metal stairs against the wall with a rhythmic clanking, He didn't seem to be in any huge hurry. The ex-slaver ground his teeth and held his breath as he clung to the walkway. Finally, a shadow fell over him. He looked up at the ghoul, and had a vision of him with his hands around his neck again. He bent down to grab one of Andy's hands, and for a moment Andy didn't know if he was going to pull him up or push him off.

"On three," Harris said.

"Okay," Andy said breathlessly.

Harris counted off, and on 'three' tightened his grip on his arm and hauled him upward. Andy pulled down on the metal sheet and was able to get a knee on the walkway. He pulled his other leg up to kneel on the metal, safe. He looked up, and Harris was already walking back down the way to the stairs. _That's an awful lot of blood on him._

"Is Lydia..." Andy started, but couldn't finish.

"She's fine," came the curt reply.

Andy rolled to the middle of the walkway and lay there gratefully. His arms ached. He couldn't really move them. He didn't much care. Harris went down in the elevator again without another word to him.

He lay still, breathing hard, for quite a while before he heard Max below him again and remembered that the android was still there. His abdominal muscles complained as he sat up and turned to look over the edge of the platform. He could see Max yanking futilely at his arm. Eventually the synth looked up and saw him, and froze.

"Do you need help?" Andy asked him.

Max studied him closely, and didn't say anything.

"Is that a no?" Andy asked eventually.

Max shuffled his feet. "Are you an A?" He asked quietly. His mouth was synced up with his voice now, at least.

"What?"

He paused again before speaking. "Which model are you?"

Andy knitted his brow in puzzlement. "I'm not any model."

"You're organic?"

"So far as I know. What's happened to you? Are you broken?"

"... You aren't SRB."

Andy snorted. "No." He pulled at the collar of his grey, not blue, jacket. "I believe they have a dress code for that club, don't they?"

Max seemed to believe him, despite the admittedly weak evidence. He turned back to his arm and thrust his other one against one of the large teeth on the wheel that trapped it. The rusted gear still didn't move. "It appears I suffered a minor voltage surge. I had to shut down and reboot, which I'm not designed to do under normal circumstances, so it's causing some problems." He paused uncertainly. Eventually he added, "I'm still restarting basic processes. A lot of my memory has been corrupted. I'm trying to recover as much as I can. Is Victoria here?"

Andy shrugged. "I don't know anyone by that name. You got hit with a pulse grenade, that's what the surge was from. You're lucky you didn't end up much worse, I think. I gather you don't remember me?"

"No. I apologize."

"Tulip is here."

"Tulip... Where?"

Andy tilted his head to his side, where the ghoul lay. Max's eyes widened as he saw her body through the perforated metal. "She was knocked out, I think," Andy explained quickly. "She's still breathing."

"Oh," Max said with a relieved sigh. "What about Lydia?"

"You remember her as well?" He was beginning to feel a little offended.

Max nodded. "Operators are saved in permanent memory—they can't be lost unless my entire brain is destroyed. Though, I don't really remember anything aside from their names and what they look like..."

"You like them both, I think," Andy filled in for him.

Max smiled. "I would assume so."

"I think you like me, too."

The synth shrugged, less sure, but not disagreeing.

"Anyway, Lydia's around. She's alive, at least," he said.

Max went back to pushing at the gear. It made a small creak, but didn't move. Finally he drew back his arm and punched one of the teeth with an open palm as hard as he could. Nothing happened. The second time he tried, there was a screech and the gear turned backwards a fraction. Flakes of rust floated out of the machinery.

Andy watched, leaning back on his arms. "You don't seem that worried about all this," he observed. "Waking up in a strange place, and injured. Is that the way it usually is with synths?"

"I don't know," Max said. "But whatever happened here, it looks like it's over now. Isn't it?"

Andy looked around at the bodies of the agents and the mercenaries (who had been an unexpected and annoying addition to the fight) on the floor. "Yeah, that's what it looks like."

Max hit the gears once more, and they moved enough to push his arm free. He pulled out the mangled limb and looked it over. His hand hung limply from his smashed wrist. The whole thing was bent at an awkward angle. The skin on his forearm was black and brown with oil and dirt and rust, and it had been ripped in several places. There was no blood. Andy shuddered.

Max tried to flex his fingers. Only his thumb moved.

"Will you be able to fix it?" Andy asked.

"I don't know."

"You could get parts from one of the other synths, couldn't you?"

Max looked up at him. "Other synths?"

"Yeah." Andy exhaled heavily. "A lot has happened. We'll have to get you caught up."

"I hope you won't have to. It will probably come back eventually," Max said. "Not all of it, but some." He went across the room to the stairs. At the first step, the metal creaked. He hesitated, then slowly took another step. The next stair creaked as he put his weight on it. It began to bend down under him. He quickly stepped off of it.

"Better not," Andy said. "If you break it, we'll have a hard time getting down."

"Yes." He backtracked across the conveyor belts and stopped under Andy and Tulip again, on the other side of the machine he'd been stuck in. He sat cross-legged on the floor. "I found something," he said. "One-point-three seconds of you in front of a door...there are boards covering windows on either side. You're standing on a narrow red carpet. You're wet. Someone's saying something, but it's not you. The rest of the file is corrupted." He looked up at Andy. "Does that sound familiar?"

"Yes." He reached up to scratch his chin, and his arm still shook weakly. "That was almost a week ago. You really don't remember anything else? Anything longer than 1.3 seconds?"

"Nothing else from the past several months. Just you," he said, smiling up at Andy.

Andy looked back at him. An odd feeling came over him as he realized how much trust the android was putting in him, considering he'd just awoken from a bad injury of sorts with no memory of how it had happened. It was nice to have someone who had forgotten who he was. It was nice to not have to be an ex-slaver.

He _was_ just a robot. Maybe he didn't know any better. Maybe he trusted everyone. Maybe androids were naturally non-judgmental. But maybe that was what he liked about Max.

"My name is Andy, by the way."

"I'm N5-07," Max said. "Victoria calls me Max."

Andy smiled. "I know."


	18. Chapter 18

Lydia listened to the quiet, completely still on her back. It felt good to not move. She closed her eyes. It was, surprisingly, quite comfortable in the irradiated room. It probably helped that this was the most tired she'd been since she could remember. Her body seemed to already be asleep. She lifted an arm and held it above her experimentally. Her sleeve slid down a short ways, and she could see her skin beginning to peel in large sections. _Hm. I really do need to leave here soon._ She twisted her hand backward and forward, and the skin around her wrist cracked. Her arm was heavy enough that she had to bring it back down after a few seconds. Her fingers tingled, but the sensation went away as she lowered them back below her heart.

This was always a strange feeling: the calm after the adrenaline rush of a fight. But it was particularly odd now, considering that just a few minutes ago she had been sure she was going to die. Somehow it felt almost anticlimactic. She'd been shot before, but this was nothing like then. She'd never been so close to not pulling through. But she didn't regret it, any more than she regretted leaving the vault—Max deserved his escape as much as she did. She had become well aware by this time that freedom came with a price, but she would never be unwilling to pay it.

Perhaps now that the Bureau agents were gone, they could take Max and Tulip to the next safehouse. The rest of the trip should be a cakewalk compared to this. She had to admit that she would be sorry to leave them behind. As irritated with them as she'd been in Underworld, she'd grown attached to them as time went by.

A short while later, Harris returned. He stopped at the edge of the greenish glow. _He doesn't even want to come in here. I should really go. There's too much radiation._ Lydia pushed herself up with one arm, leaning on her elbow, then stopped as her head spun. Her vision blurred and was spotted with black static and circles of color.

By the time it cleared, Harris had moved and was bending down next to her. "What's going on up there?" she asked as he picked her up.

"Everyone's alive. Max is still stuck in the machinery, but the grenade didn't kill him." He took her out of the light and started toward the elevator.

"Good," Lydia sighed. She felt like letting herself fall asleep right there, but then she remembered that they hadn't dealt with all their enemies yet. "There's another merc. He followed me down here."

"You killed him?"

"No."

He stopped, and she felt him tense slightly. She wouldn't have noticed if she were just looking at him, but she could feel it when he was holding her. "Where?"

"The end of the next hallway. He'll be waking up soon. I sedated him."

Harris paused, as if deciding what to do, then he leaned down and set her on her feet so he could take his gun from its holster. All the blood drained from her head, and she saw spots again. She felt herself going limp. _Damn it._ She tilted to the side and slowly began falling. Harris darted to grab her arm. Then it was dark.

She reached out to catch hold of Harris and keep herself from falling. She had her arm outstretched in front of her for a moment before she realized she wasn't falling anymore. She was lying on a cot. She looked up. Harris sat on the floor next to her. They were in the first aid room. The mercenary was sprawled in front of the doorway where she'd left him.

"How long has it been?" Lydia said, pulling her arm back to her side.

"A minute or two," Harris replied.

She looked at the armored man on the floor. "Aren't you going to kill him?"

"Did you want me to?"

"I don't know. I just assumed you were going to."

"If he's going to die, he at least has a right to see it coming."

They waited for what seemed like a long time. Lydia was still tired, but too nervous to fall asleep. Instead she sat still and listened to her own ragged (but greatly improved) breathing. She wondered if her lungs would ever be the same.

"Do you have water?" she asked.

"Upstairs. Can you wait?"

"Yes." She coughed quietly.

Finally the mercenary made a sound. A moment later his eyelids flickered and he moved an arm. He tried to sit up, unsuccessfully. He stopped moving when Harris stood and cocked his gun. The mercenary glanced at the gun, then squinted up at his face.

"What do you want?" Harris asked.

The mercenary paused. "Well," he said, his voice sounding as though he hadn't quite learned how to use it yet, "if I could just leave quietly, that'd be nice..."

"What do you want from _us_?"

"I don't want anything from you, I-" the mercenary started.

"Don't waste my time. If you don't tell me, I'll just kill you and take the contract from your corpse."

The mercenary hesitated again. Then he slowly reached into a pocket on his armor and pulled out piece of yellowed paper that had been folded many times. He held it out. Harris took it from him and handed it to Lydia, refusing to look away from the mercenary despite his apparent weakened state.

Lydia slowly unfolded the paper. It was stained and ripped in several places. She could barely read the sloppy handwriting on it. _Payment to be delivered upon retrieval of or proof of death of Sam Harris,_ it said at the top _._ She stared at it. "Your name is Sam?" she said disbelievingly.

"How long has that been out?" Harris asked the mercenary.

"Not very long. They only just discovered you were still alive. That makes you a deserter."

"You're coming after him after all this time just for that?" Lydia said, her voice tinged with annoyance.

"If the other mercs hear that someone got away with breaking their contract with the Company, they might get ideas," the man replied. "It's nothing personal, you understand?"

"It never is," Harris said.

"I really don't care, myself," the mercenary explained slowly. He seemed to be carefully choosing his words, implying something that he wasn't saying outright. "I just want to get paid."

Harris glared at him. "Are you asking me to bribe you?"

"No!" the mercenary said quickly, his eyes going wide. "No. What I meant was that, the next feral I run into, I'll cut a finger from them and tell my boss that it's yours. Because if I never come back, they'll know you're still alive and they'll keep sending more after you."

"You could get into a lot of trouble for that," Harris said.

"Yeah, well, it's better than getting shot now. I'll cross future bridges when I come to them."

Lydia highly doubted that the mercenary would actually do as he said, but he was right: they didn't really have much to gain from killing him, either. This was worth a shot, at least.

She looked down, and saw that the stim she'd used on him had skimmed across the floor when he slapped it out of her hand, and had stopped right next to her cot. She reached down and picked it up. There was still more than half of the solution left. She held it up. "Harris."

He glanced back at her, and saw the needle. He held out his hand, and Lydia gave it to him. The mercenary gave them a suspicious look. Harris went and knelt next to him, keeping the gun trained on him. He stabbed the needle into his neck, but didn't push the plunger yet. "If I anyone ever comes after me with that contract again, I'll hold you personally responsible, and after I deal with them, I'll find you and kill you, too," Harris warned him fiercely. Lydia managed to hide an amused snort under the guise of a cough.

The mercenary just looked at him. He couldn't very well nod or shake his head with the needle in his neck, and Lydia bet it wouldn't be comfortable to speak, either. But there was little doubt that he understood. Harris injected him with the sedative, and after a moment his eyes closed and his face went slack.

"Well. That oughta scare him good," Lydia said.

Harris rolled his eyes, but was smiling faintly. He set the empty stim on the desk. "How long will he be out?"

"Depends. Maybe twenty minutes."

"We should get moving. Will you faint again if you sit up?"

She maneuvered her arm beneath her and pushed up slowly. Her head felt floaty, a sensation that was incongruous with how tired and heavy the rest of her was. Her vision blurred again, but she didn't pass out. "Your name is Sam?" she asked again.

"Don't call me that."

She smiled. "Okay." He knelt in front of her so she could get on his back. She looped her arms around his neck and fairly fell onto him. He hooked his arms under her knees and lifted her up more steadily than when he'd been carrying her the other way. He stepped over the body of the Talon Company mercenary and started down the hall—for the last time, Lydia hoped. She wouldn't mind leaving this place behind.

Lydia sighed. She was hungry and thirsty, but mostly tired. Her eyes were drooping closed of their own accord. The hunger and thirst could wait. "Is it okay with you if I go to sleep?" she asked.

"Yeah. Are you okay?"

"Yeah." She closed her arms a little tighter around his neck. Which was probably less comfortable for him, but she doubted he minded.

He moved awkwardly sideways to push the call button next to the elevator without dropping her, and the doors opened. He stepped inside. As the doors closed, they cut off the small amount of light that emanated from the hallway, leaving them in darkness. Lydia closed her eyes. She felt Harris look over his shoulder at her, then turn to face forward again.

The elevator rumbled upward.

-lll-

The first thing Harris looked for when the elevator doors opened was Andy. He hadn't moved from where he'd left him on the catwalk. His gun was holstered. He looked down at the sound of the doors opening.

The second thing he looked for was Max, because he could already see that he was gone. Then the android stepped out from behind one of the monoliths of black metal that crowded the room. He looked at Harris blankly. His brow knitted as he looked down at the dark stains on his clothes. He held one arm behind his back. This made Harris uncomfortable until he realized it was the one that had been stuck in the machine. Max seemed like the type to be embarrassed by whatever deformity had resulted.

He stepped out of the elevator, assured-to the extent that you ever could be sure of this-that no one was going to kill him or Lydia if he did so. Her arms hung loosely over his chest and waved slightly as he moved. She'd fallen asleep already.

He could still see Tulip's outline through the walkway above him. As he watched, she twitched, and her left arm moved.

Everyone seemed to be waiting for him to tell them what to do. That seemed to happen a lot. "We can't stay here," he said to the other two. "Check the bodies for stimpaks or anything else of use, then we'll go."

Max didn't move. His eyes were locked on Lydia.

"That's Harris," Andy said to him. "He's not very polite, I know, but you should probably do what he says. Lydia's safe with him."

Max glanced up at Andy. He nodded faintly, letting his broken arm fall to his side, into view. He was holding what looked like a severed arm in his other hand, Harris realized. Instead of a bone, metal rods protruded from the end of it. Replacement parts. Max turned and climbed over the conveyor belts to search for bodies.

Harris raised an eyebrow at Andy.

"He's lost a lot of memory, apparently," the slaver said. "The last thing he remembers is before he came to Underworld. He seems functional, otherwise."

_Great._ Tulip moved again. Andy moved away from the edge of the catwalk as he turned toward her, partially obstructing Harris's view of him. He felt his heart rate increase. He couldn't get to his gun very easily while he was holding Lydia, which bothered him a great deal.

After a moment, Tulip stood, steadying herself against Andy. Harris realized he'd been grinding his teeth, and stopped.

Max returned. He held out an ancient grocery sack. "The stimpaks were all empty," he said. "But I found this."

"Isn't that yours?" Andy said.

Harris looked at the logo on the bag. It was the same bag of caps he'd given the people outside the metro station earlier. "Put it in there," he said, and he nodded to his rucksack, which he'd stashed in a corner before the Bureau agents and mercs came. "Get that, too," he said, indicating his broken assault rifle which still lay discarded on the floor.

"No one died?" Tulip said, looking dazed. "How unexpected." She and Andy came down the stairs, careful to avoid the few at the end that were bent or eroded away. She touched her hand to her head, as though it hurt, but she lowered it after a moment. She looked at Max, and her eyes fell on his mangled arm. "Oh, Max..." she said sadly. She went and hugged him. Max looked surprised, but not put off. He hesitantly patted her back. She didn't seem to notice his confusion.

Seeing Andy up close, Harris noticed he had plasma burns over his clothes and face. The slaver's hand rested at his side, inches from his gun. Harris started grinding his teeth again. He should have made him leave a long time ago. They were far enough out by now that he'd probably die in the Wastes before he got anywhere where he could cause harm. On the other hand, if they'd had any fewer people on their side in this fight, at least some of them would probably be dead now. And he had to admit, if this was still some plot against them, it was an abnormally long and elaborate one.

"What now?" asked the subject of his contemplation.

-lll-

As it happened, there was a safehouse located about twenty miles from the recycling plant. It was difficult to find, but there wasn't exactly any doubt that it was the place they were looking for. It was the only building for miles around, and for good reason. It was hidden at the top of a rocky cliffside, strategically built under outcroppings of stone that shielded it from view unless you were in just the right spot. It reminded Lydia a bit of Harris's house.

They stopped outside to say their goodbyes. Tulip wasted no time in taking hold of Lydia and squeezing all the air from her lungs.

"Ow," Lydia croaked weakly.

"Oh! Sorry," Tulip said, and gave her a slightly smaller hug. "Forgot about that. You sure you're healing up okay?"

"I will," Lydia said, "so long as you don't do that again."

"Well, I suppose you won't have to worry about that, after this." Tulip smiled ruefully. "You're a good kid," she said sincerely. "I hope you know that."

Lydia just smiled sheepishly, unsure what to say to that. Max approached her next, and embraced her much more delicately with his non-broken arm.

"You've removed my operator status?" Lydia asked him.

He nodded, pulling away to stand at arm's length. "If I don't, I can't leave you," he said, sounding apologetic.

Over the past day and a half he'd remembered Tulip, but was still working on her and Harris. It was questionable whether he'd ever regain memories of his time with them. But still he felt guilty about leaving them. Lydia smiled. Despite that shock he'd gotten, he was undoubtably the same person. She wondered if it would have been the same for the other synths, or if an innate personality was something unique to him.

"Don't worry, we'll be okay," she assured him.

"You don't know that."

Lydia shrugged. "I don't _know_ , but that's what I think."

Max smiled. "I hope so. And I hope we see you again someday."

"We will," Lydia said. Max nodded to her, then to Harris (whom no one had attempted to hug yet), and he and Tulip started across the uneven ground toward the house.

Then Andy appeared in front of her.

"It was good seeing you again," he said, without a trace of sarcasm.

Lydia almost laughed, then realized what he was saying. "You're leaving?"

"Yes, I was speaking with Max and Tulip about it earlier. I'm going with them."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "I've got nothing else to do. Unless you wouldn't mind me coming along with you...?"

Lydia exchanged a look with Harris. Both were conspicuously silent.

"I thought not." It was hard to tell how he felt about this. He wore a faint smile, as he always seemed to, but Lydia hadn't forgotten things he'd said to her before, or how much he'd put up with just so he could stay with them even when he could have left long ago. But she'd seen the way he'd been talking to Max recently. He and Tulip didn't seem to mind him. Maybe he'd decided that a fresh start would be easier than staying with her and Harris.

He held out a hand. "Thanks for everything."

Lydia held out her own hand. Andy took it, but instead of shaking it, he held it for a moment, looking at her. Lydia gave him an impatient look, and was about to say something when he suddenly pulled her into a quick hug, then hurried away after Tulip and Max before she could respond.

Lydia stared after him in surprise. Tulip and Max were already speaking to someone at the door. After a moment, they turned and waved. Lydia waved back, and watched them disappear inside.

The door closed. There was no more movement on the cliff top. Suddenly it felt very quiet and lonely, after traveling for so long with such a big group. The wind blew her hair into her face, and she pushed it away.

Gravel shifted under Harris's feet as he moved, and Lydia turned to look at him. He watched her expectantly. She smiled.

"What?"

She smiled wider. "Nothing." She coughed once into her sleeve, and the sudden movement made her a bit dizzy. It hurt, but there was no blood anymore. She gingerly pressed a hand to her chest, feeling the scar tissue that had built up there under her shirt. Harris moved to steady her as she wobbled slightly. She didn't really need the help anymore, but she didn't move away. "It's okay," she said. She felt down his arm until she found his hand. Her heart beat a little faster when he curled his fingers through hers before she could. "It's already way better than it was yesterday. I'll live."

"For now."

She snorted. The cynicism was, honestly, probably a realistic viewpoint. "Until the next gang of people-who-want-to-kill-us-for-some-reason-or-another comes along." _Let them come,_ she thought. Harris would probably say she was foolishly optimistic. Maybe it was the blood loss. But she couldn't convince herself that there was anything or anyone that could keep the two of them down for long.

Harris looked at her sidelong, a grim smile creeping across his face. "Until then," he agreed.

— _Fin!—_


End file.
